StealthMail is an exciting, user friendly but highly secure encrypted e-mail product. It will quickly enable both novices and experts to send completely secure mail including attachments to friends and colleagues who have StealthMail installed.
Introduction
The StealthWare Security Suite is a collection of innovative security applications designed to work together to provide the user with a comprehensive set of data security tools that are easy to setup and use.
A key component of the security suite is the implementation of secure e-mail in such a way that users enjoy the benefits of fully encrypted mail without the expense of annual certificate fees and without the need to store copies of keys for every recipient they want to communicate with. All of the key components of the architecture have been implemented and will shortly be released for Beta Testing.
Please note that the Beta Release will NOT be a finished product. It may NOT include extensive error trapping and many other proposed features including full HTML support, attachments, Groups, Private Address Books, integration into Outlook and other mail clients, virus and SPAM protection, etc. The ‘look and feel’ may also change.
Brief Description of the StealthMail Architecture
Client A wants to send an encrypted mail to Client B.
As both people are StealthMail users this is extremely simple. Client A uses the StealthMail application or Outlook, etc plug-in to prepare the mail and add any attachments. He then selects Client B from the StealthMail Address Book. He then just clicks the Send Button and the message is encrypted and sent to Client B.
What happens in the background?
StealthMail then retrieves the security information it needs from the secure application servers to allow it to create a unique session key which will be used to encrypt the mail. This key is unique to every single mail and is different every time. StealthMail uses the very powerful and extremely fast Elliptic Curve Method to create public/private key pairs and to generate session keys for each and every mail message.
The message, and any attachments, is encrypted before it leaves the users PC. Everything that travels across the internet is fully encrypted BEFORE it ever reaches the internet. The message is then sent to the recipient in the normal way.
Client B wants to read an encrypted mail from Client A.
Client B uses the StealthMail client to retrieve any mail messages from his POP3 server. The message headers are downloaded to the client and displayed for the user.
Client B sees an encrypted mail from Client A and simply double clicks on the message header. The message is displayed to the user in decrypted form.
What happens in the background?
StealthMail extracts an exchange key from the message and uses this, together with the recipients on key information to re-create the unique session key used to encrypt the message. This is then used to decrypt the message and any attachments.
The important point to understand here is that the key used to encrypt the data is NEVER passed across the internet and neither the sender nor the recipient has any knowledge of the key used.
