White Papers for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

Email Authentication Whitepaper

IronPort Systems

The problems of spam, viruses, phishing and most email denial-of-service attacks can all be traced back to a single common cause – lack of authentication in the email protocol SMTP.

This lack of authentication means that a receiving mail server cannot reliably verify that a particular message is in fact from the sender it purports to be from, making it harder to identify friend from foe.

The industry has recognized this shortcoming, and a great deal of effort has been put into developing a new standard that will “overlay” SMTP and provide the sender authentication that is so desperately needed. This paper will present a brief history of how this problem evolved, explore the pluses and minuses of the leading standards proposals, and highlight some recommendations.

View the White Paper

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