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The e-mail has become the killer application on the internet. Using e-mail is a main way of communications, so the secure e-mail becomes a very important subject. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) are widely adopted on the Internet to let e-mail provide the secure services of confidentiality and integrity. Both of the solutions adopt public-key cryptography to solve the session key exchange problem. Public-key has the various ways of distribution. Public-key server and Certificate authority provide public-key services of retrieval and authentication, but different users have different methods to distribute public-key information; users face the problem of public-key information that is not easily retrieval.
In this thesis, we proposed an open architecture to solve the problem of public-key information that is not easily retrieval. The main purpose is to design an automatic public-key retrieval mechanism that must be compatible with mostly e-mail system. In this architecture, we also provide friendly user interface of secure e-mail to users, make it more convenient when one uses secure e-mail solutions. By the security and convenience, let it be more and more users to use secure e-mail solutions in the future of the proposed architecture.
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