WSEmail: A Retrospective on a System for Secure Internet Messaging Based on Web Services
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2019
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| _version_ | 1866914007038820352 |
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| author | May, Michael J. Lux, Kevin D. Gunter, Carl A. |
| author_facet | May, Michael J. Lux, Kevin D. Gunter, Carl A. |
| contents | Web services offer an opportunity to redesign a variety of older systems to exploit the advantages of a flexible, extensible, secure set of standards. In this work we revisit WSEmail, a system proposed over ten years ago to improve email by redesigning it as a family of web services. WSEmail offers an alternative vision of how instant messaging and email services could have evolved, offering security, extensibility, and openness in a distributed environment instead of the hardened walled gardens that today's rich messaging systems have become. WSEmail's architecture, especially its automatic plug-in download feature allows for rich extensions without changing the base protocol or libraries. We demonstrate WSEmail's flexibility using three business use cases: secure channel instant messaging, business workflows with routed forms, and on-demand attachments. Since increased flexibility often mitigates against security and performance, we designed WSEmail with security in mind and formally proved the security of one of its core protocols (on-demand attachments) using the TulaFale and ProVerif automated proof tools. We provide performance measurements for WSEmail functions in a prototype we implemented using .NET. Our experiments show a latency of about a quarter of a second per transaction under load. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1908_02108 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2019 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | WSEmail: A Retrospective on a System for Secure Internet Messaging Based on Web Services May, Michael J. Lux, Kevin D. Gunter, Carl A. Networking and Internet Architecture Cryptography and Security Software Engineering Web services offer an opportunity to redesign a variety of older systems to exploit the advantages of a flexible, extensible, secure set of standards. In this work we revisit WSEmail, a system proposed over ten years ago to improve email by redesigning it as a family of web services. WSEmail offers an alternative vision of how instant messaging and email services could have evolved, offering security, extensibility, and openness in a distributed environment instead of the hardened walled gardens that today's rich messaging systems have become. WSEmail's architecture, especially its automatic plug-in download feature allows for rich extensions without changing the base protocol or libraries. We demonstrate WSEmail's flexibility using three business use cases: secure channel instant messaging, business workflows with routed forms, and on-demand attachments. Since increased flexibility often mitigates against security and performance, we designed WSEmail with security in mind and formally proved the security of one of its core protocols (on-demand attachments) using the TulaFale and ProVerif automated proof tools. We provide performance measurements for WSEmail functions in a prototype we implemented using .NET. Our experiments show a latency of about a quarter of a second per transaction under load. |
| title | WSEmail: A Retrospective on a System for Secure Internet Messaging Based on Web Services |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture Cryptography and Security Software Engineering |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02108 |