3 e-mail encryption packages help businesses stay secure

[dhilipkumar]

3 e-mail encryption packages help businesses stay secure

Hushmail Business

You have two options for your e-mail client: use Hush's Web client or download an Outlook plug-in. While the plug-in is nice -- it will work with Exchange as well there is a bug in Microsoft Outlook 2002 that causes problems with forwarded and replied messages.

The message that goes out will either appear to the recipient to be blank, or the recipient will see encrypted data, but the data will not decrypt. To resolve this issue, you need to install Microsoft Office XP Service Pack 2 along with the Office 2002 update.

If you choose to encrypt a message to a user that the Hush key server doesn't know about, you will be offered a question-and-answer dialog that will be presented to the user when they first get an encrypted message. If they answer the question correctly, the message will be decrypted and presented to the recipient.

[dhilipkumar]

PGP Universal Gateway Email

PGP (for Pretty Good Privacy), the granddaddy of e-mail encryption, started as a pet project of Phil Zimmermann (who is still associated with the company) and has been on its own now since 2002,

it including whole disk encryption, desktop e-mail encryption clients and its Universal server, which runs its own variation of the Linux operating system on a very limited collection of hardware that it lists on its Web site or on VMware virtual machine images.

When a user clicks on the embedded URL, they are taken through a series of steps to register their identity, pick a passphrase and select how they want to receive subsequent communications from among four different options:

# Via Web Messenger, meaning that they continue to use a Web browser to view their e-mails
# Via a background PGP service that is installed on their client, what PGP calls Universal Satellite
# Via the full PGP Desktop client or an S/Mime e-mail client
# Via e-mail as password-protected PDF attachments


The advantage to using PGP is that if you have correspondents who have implemented encrypted e-mail, chances are high that they are familiar with PGP and are using its desktop products.

[dhilipkumar]

Voltage SecureMail Connected Gateway

Voltage Security, like PGP, offers a wide variety of encryption packages, including two server-based products. The first is Voltage Security Network (VSN),

Once you run the software to create the appliance, you still need to change the domain and MX mail records for your domain. When I tried it, it all took less than an hour. Connected Gateway automatically sets up two policies for encryption and decryption, and you can add other policies in the same way you'd do on any firewall console.

Voltage offers an Outlook/Outlook Express plug-in that supports automatic encryption -- it's really a custom-generated Windows MSI file that your users install

Conclusions

The good news is that all three of these solutions work easily and will protect your e-mails from end to end. They aren't difficult to implement and won't take up a lot of IT support resources handling key management issues either. If you need the security of keeping your e-mails private, they are all worth a closer look. And while they aren't effortless to set up, they are fairly effortless for end users on a daily basis.


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