TY - JOUR
T1 - WSEmail
T2 - An architecture and system for secure Internet messaging based on web services
AU - May, Michael J.
AU - Lux, Kevin D.
AU - Gunter, Carl A.
N1 - Funding Information:
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.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2020/3/1
Y1 - 2020/3/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Electronic mail
KW - Email workflow
KW - On-demand attachments
KW - Rich messaging
KW - Security
KW - Web services
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U2 - 10.1007/s11761-019-00283-9
DO - 10.1007/s11761-019-00283-9
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85078152666
SN - 1863-2386
VL - 14
SP - 5
EP - 17
JO - Service Oriented Computing and Applications
JF - Service Oriented Computing and Applications
IS - 1
ER -