Secure Email with S/MIME

Many organizations want to secure the email messages of their most important individuals—for example, their senior executives. Secure MIME (S/MIME), an email security solution commonly supported in today's email software, can provide confidentiality, data authentication, and integrity protection for email messages. S/MIME secures messages in an end-to-end way—not only while the message is in transmission, but also when it's stored in the database of a mail server.

I'll show you how to use S/MIME to solve security problems in a Microsoft messaging environment. Configuring the current Microsoft Outlook versions to use S/MIME is easy, but as you'll see, the underlying certificate infrastructure required to make S/MIME work takes some careful thought and preparation.

S/MIME Basics
S/MIME adds data authentication, confidentiality, nonrepudiation, and integrity protection to MIME-formatted messages. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF at http:// www.ietf.org) standardized S/MIME 3.0 in Requests for Comments (RFCs) 2632 through 2634. . . .