AnZenMail: A secure and certified e-mail system

Abstract

We are developing a secure and certified e-mail system AnZenMail that provides an experimental testbed for our cutting-edge security enhancement technologies. In addition to a provably secure message transfer protocol, we have designed and implemented a server (MTU) and a client (MUA) in order that they could survive recent malicious attacks such as server-cracking and e-mail viruses. The AnZenMail server is implemented in Java, a memory-safe language, and so it is free from stack smashing. Some of its safety properties have been formally verified in Coq mostly at the source code level by manually translating Java methods into Coq functions. The AnZenMail client is designed to provide a support for secure execution of mobile code arriving as e-mail attachments. It has plug-in interfaces for code inspection and execution modules such as static analysis tools, runtime/inline reference monitors, and an anti-virus engine, which are currently being developed by members of our research project. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.