Digitally-Signed Email: Authentication and Digital Signatures

E-mail was one of the first “killer apps” on the Internet, and has been a major contributor to increases in productivity over the past ten years. Of course, along with email came the scourge of spam. Criminals infect computers with trojan horse programs, creating collections of machines they control remotely to send millions of unsolicited offers for fake watches, pirated software, phony medications and ecard invitations to infect your computer.

As spam reaches 30, 40 or even 100 unwanted messages per day on a targeted account, it is becoming essential to automatically separate legitimate messages from spam. One tool available to senders of legitimate emails to aid the recipient in this process is to digitally sign their messages, allowing the recipient to establish a level of comfort that the message actually came from the indicated sender.

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