WSEmail: Secure Internet Messaging Based on Web Services

  • Authors:
  • Kevin D. Lux;Michael J. May;Nayan L. Bhattad;Carl A. Gunter

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Pennsylvania;University of Pennsylvania;University of Pennsylvania;University of Pennsylvania

  • Venue:
  • ICWS '05 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Web Services
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Web services offer an opportunity to redesign a variety of oldersystems to exploit the advantages of a flexible, extensible, secureset of standards. In this paper we explore the objective of improvingInternet messaging (email) by redesigning it as a family of web services,an approach we call WSEmail. We illustrate an architecture anddescribe some applications. Since increased flexibility often mitigates against security and performance, we focus on steps for provingsecurity properties and measuring the performance of our system withits security operations. In particular, we demonstrate an automated proofusing TulaFale and ProVerif of a correspondence theorem for anapplication called on-demand attachments. We also provide performancemeasures for the basic WSEmail functions in a prototype we haveimplemented using .NET. Our experiments show a latency of about aquarter of a second per transaction under load.