Internet Security

200 8.1 Safe communication: Messaging

8.1

Safe communication: Messaging

Two lovers stand in the bedroom gazing into each other's longing eyes.

They move toward the bed, their bodies pulling closer like a magnet and a

piece of iron. Their hearts thump like loudspeakers at a rock concert. Closer

they move to the point of serious communiqu6. Now, with lust in their

hearts, they exchange their x.509 certificates and send an encrypted message

of love.

Whew~that was hot! What intense communication? Fortunately, our

lovers practiced "safe communication." First they exchanged certificates and

then consummated their communication. In this case, they set up a secure

channel between themselves and established end-to-end privacy. This pro-

cess involved using the certificates to identify themselves, after which they

enabled SSL. And the data flowed in both directions. They lived happily

ever after and were totally safe from all bugs and viruses~that is, until one

of them said, "I love you." Oops. I just crashed my partner and wiped out

his/her hard drive. How can this be? All I did was forward the simple mes-

sage "I love you." What happened?

The moral of our story is ... love hurts. No, wait, that's not it. The real

lesson is that secure messaging is a battle against the elements, which

include the following:

• Uninformed users

• Foolhardy administrators

• Premeditated attacks

• Bad use of messaging resources

• Limited implementation of messaging~that is, not enough resources

Messaging is one of the most important mission-critical applications of

the network era. For anyone who is not convinced, imagine shutting down

the messaging servers in your company for five days. What would happen?

The CIO would be inundated with complaints from the company's

employees~and even from customers and vendors~that the business was

inoperable without messaging capability. As we can see, messaging is critical

to doing good business.

Following are some of the components that comprise a messaging system:

•

E-mail systems

• The ability to send a messages to multiple recipients