Secure Email Transmission Protocols -- A New Architecture Design

Abstract: During today's digital age, emails have become a crucial part of communications for both personal and enterprise usage. However, email transmission protocols were not designed with security in mind, and this has always been a challenge while trying to make email transmission more secure. On top of the basic layer of SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols to send and retrieve emails, there are several other major security protocols used in current days to secure email transmission such as TLS/SSL, STARTTLS, and PGP/GPG encryption. The most general design used in email transmission architecture is SMTP with PGP/GPG encryption sending through an TLS/SSL secure channel. Regardless, vulnerabilities within these security protocols and encryption methods, there is still work can be done regarding the architecture design. In this paper, we discuss the challenges among current email transmission security protocols and architectures. We explore some new techniques and propose a new email transmission architecture using EEKS structure and Schnorr Signature to eliminate the usage of PGP/GPG for encryption while achieving Perfect Forward Secrecy.