Transforming paper mail to electronic mail (E-Mail)
As the world's process of communications changes from the paper
format to the Electronic Mail (E-Mail) format, new processes must
be placed to ensure that the information is still reliable and
secure. Today, millions of people send and receive information
that may pass through several systems where anyone with access
to the system can view or change the contents of E-Mail. Securing e-mail using Digital Certificates One way to help prevent this problem is to use a digital certificate
issued from a certified Certificate Authority (CA) to prove the
identity of the sender and ensure the information has not been
tampered with. What is a Digital Certificate?
You may ask, what is a digital certificate and how does it help ensure security?
A digital certificate is a uniquely generated
identification number and information that determines your identity
which is saved on your computer with a private key (also know as
a password - which only you know) and a public key (Anyone may know
this). The public part of the digital certificate is shipped along
with the original e-mail message to it's destination using a message
digest (unique number to determine if message has been tampered with)
and can be used to encrypt (encode) your E-mail messages so that
nobody else can read them.
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