Email encryption is a method of data compression that changes your files into a format that is inaccessible to unauthorized persons. This is done to make sure that confidential and sensitive data transmitted over the Internet will not be read by a third party. If you want to do more than just email encryption, you can also apply encryption to an entire volume or drive. To make use of the drive, you need a special decryption key. Once you have finished accessing files in the drive, it then returns to its encrypted state, making it unreadable by spyware, Trojan horses, or snoops.

Email encryption and other encryption schemes may be symmetric or asymmetric. Symmetric key algorithms include AES and DES, and Blowfish. These algorithms work with only one key that the sender and receiver share. This key serves to encrypt and decrypt text. Asymmetric encryption schemes, on the other hand, use a pair of keys, a public key, and a private key. The public key can be posted online so that senders can use this for email encryption. Once data have been encrypted, they can only be decrypted by the person who has the private key. Asymmetric email encryption is considered more secure because the decryption key may be kept private.

Email encryption using public key encryption

The “key” used for email encryption is a small bit of text code that activates the associated algorithm to decode or encode messages. In public key encryption, two keys are produced by an encryption program and are linked to an email address or a name. The public key can be shared to friends and other people so that they can use it to encrypt messages that are meant for the owner of the key. Once the owner receives the encrypted text, he or she can then use the private key to decrypt it.

Why use public key encryption for email encryption

Email encryption done using public key encryption assures the users that their emails are secure. Although many individuals are likely to consider email encryption as an excessive way to maintain privacy, this is great for those who want to keep certain email correspondence private. Email encryption gives one the assurance that any stored emails on mail servers, as well as messages in transit, will all be unreadable to a third party.

“Until now, organisations globally were forced to purchase, deploy and manage disparate point products that exposed security gaps and increased complexity and operational costs,” says Shawn Eldridge, vice president of marketing and products for BorderWare.

“With BorderWare Security Platform 8.0, organizations can infinitely scale to correlate security across email and Web, consolidate administration and policy management, leverage data loss prevention across email and Web, and enable value-added features and functionalities based on each customer’s security and privacy needs and goals.”

Featuring data loss prevention (DLP) across multiple protocols, the company reports that the new BorderWare Security Platform 8.0 is specifically designed to prevent threats via a flexible and efficient approach for quickly integrating new and customer-selected security and privacy features, accommodating unlimited customer growth, and consolidating administration, reporting and policy management.

“Security breaches no longer appear in just one communication channel, but as sophisticated, blended threats across email and Web. Mid-market organizations are looking not only for DLP but also for proficient management capabilities,” notes Brian Burke, program director for IDC’s security products program.

It enables instant-on data loss prevention, encryption and content filtering with integrated threat prevention for viruses, spam, spyware, phishing, crimeware and malware attacks. Other features that can be individually enabled include email encryption or Web caching. The management console consolidates all email and Web features in a single interface, providing security operations of reporting, policy management, policy remediation, on-demand feature enablement and clustering. BorderWare Security Platform can be managed both remotely and locally.