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WSEmail

An architecture and system for secure Internet messaging based on web services

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Abstract

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 10 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.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for discussions of WSEmail that we had with Martin Abadi, Raja Afandi, Noam Arzt, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Luca Cardelli, Dan Fay, Eric Freudenthal, Cedric Fournet, Andy Gordon, Ari Hershl Gordon-Schlosberg, Munawar Hafiz, Jin Heo, Himanshu Khurana, Ralph Johnson, Bjorn Knutsson, Jay Patel, Neelay Shah, Kaijun Tan, and Jianqing Zhang. We are also grateful to Nayan L. Bhattad for technical support with experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kinneret Academic College, Zemach Regional Center, Jordan Valley, 1513200, Israel

    Michael J. May

  2. University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Kevin D. Lux

  3. Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey, USA

    Kevin D. Lux

  4. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana Illinois, USA

    Carl A. Gunter

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  1. Michael J. May
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Correspondence to Michael J. May.

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Our work was supported by Microsoft University Relations, National Science Foundation Grants CCR02-08996 and EIA00-88028, Office of Naval Research Grant N000014-02-1-0715, and Army Research Office Grant DAAD-19-01-1-0473.

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May, M.J., Lux, K.D. & Gunter, C.A. WSEmail. SOCA 14, 5–17 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-019-00283-9

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