A novel solution for end-to-end integrity protection in signed PGP mail

Abstract

PGP mail has been widely used to provide the end-to-end authentication, integrity and non-repudiation. However it has the significant drawback that the email header is unauthentic. DKIM protects specified header fields, but only between the sending server and the receiver. These lead to possible impersonation attacks and profiling of the email communication, and encourage spam and phishing activities. In this paper we propose an approach to extend PGP mail to support end-to-end integrity of whole email, namely the whole content and selected header fields. This approach is fully compatible with PGP mail. Under some reasonable assumption our approach can help to reduce spam efficiently. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.