Distributed Systems Approach to Secure Internet Mail, Computers and Security, vol. 24 no. 6 pp 492-499, 2005
One of the obstacles to improved security of the Internet is ad hoc development
of technologies with different design goals and different security goals. This paper
proposes reconceptualizing the Internet as a secure distributed system, focusing
specifically on the application layer. The notion is to replace specific functionality
by an equivalent, based on principles discovered in research on distributed systems
in the decades since the initial development of the Internet. Because of the
problems in retrofitting new technology across millions of clients and servers, any
options with prospects of success must support backward compatibility. This paper
outlines a possible new architecture for internet-based mail which would replace
existing protocols by a more secure framework. To maintain backward compatability,
initial implementation could offer a web browser-based front end, but the
longer-term approach would be to implement the system using appropriate models
of replication.
(published version)