Usable secure mailing lists with untrusted servers

Abstract

Mailing lists are a natural technology for supporting messaging in multi-party, cross-domain collaborative tasks. However, whenever sensitive information is exchanged on such lists, security becomes crucial. We have earlier developed a prototype secure mailing list solution called SELS (Secure Email List Services) based on proxy encryption techniques [20], which enables the transformation of cipher-text from one key to another without revealing the plain-text. Emails exchanged using SELS are ensured confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. This includes ensuring their confidentiality while in transit at the list server; a functionality that is uniquely supported by SELS through proxy re-encryption. In this work we describe our efforts in studying and enhancing the usability of the software system and our experiences in supporting a production environment that currently is used by more than 50 users in 11 organizations. As evidence of its deployability, SELS is compatible with common email clients including Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, Emacs, and Mutt. As evidence of its usability, the software is being used by several national and international incident response teams.

Palantir

“…The Palantir system provides the collaborative workspace for discussions and data sharing among incident investigators, as seen in Figure 4. Collaboration mechanisms in the workspace include a data repository for log files, network traces, and other forensic data, a wiki for providing an overview of the incident for new members, documenting incident details, and keeping a timestamped incident notebook, secure instant messaging for real-time discussions, secure email lists [7,19,20] for ongoing discussions, anonymization tools [33] for sanitizing data before it is shared, analysis tools [10], and visualization tools [36].…”

Secure and efficient data‐sharing in clouds

“…Later, two bidirectional schemes without pairings in the random oracle were proposed in . Bidirectional PRE scheme is a very useful primitive in practice, especially in collaborative tasks using email lists , but the main problem is that it usually needs to run a multiparty protocol among three users beforehand to generate a re‐encryption key(i.e., two users with their own secret keys and a proxy with nothing as inputs: after the execution of the protocol, the proxy obtains the corresponding re‐encryption key, the two users obtains nothing). Canetti et al , left an open problem to construct a chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA) secure unidirectional PRE scheme (without parings).…”