This project webpage has been re-located to: http://sels.ncsa.uiuc.edu. Please go there for more recent work.

SELS: Secure Email List Services

News About SELS Staff Publications Presentations Experiments For More Information Home

News

· 12/05/2005   Certified Mailing List paper accepted for publication at AsiaCCS’06

· 09/12/2005 SELS receives Honorary Mention in ComputerWorld Horizon Awards

· 04/11/2005 SELS accepted for 5-minute abstract presentation at IEEE Security and Privacy, Oakland, 2005

· 03/24/2005 SELS to receive funding under ONR’s NCASSR Y3 program (part of the Mithril project) for Sep’05 – August’06

· 10/18/2004 SELS paper accepted at ACM SAC’05

About SELS

Electronic mail is one of the most widely used means of communication. As more user communities engage in collaborative tasks, use of E-mail List Services (ELSs), i.e., e-mails exchanged with the help of a list server, are also becoming common. Considerable work has been done in providing solutions that enable secure exchange of e-mail between two parties; i.e., solutions for e-mail confidentiality, integrity, and authentication such as PGP and S/MIME. However, little or no work has been done towards providing similar solutions for ELSs. This is a crucial technology gap as corporate and research environments could significantly benefit from secure ELSs. Consider a team that needs to exchange customer information and analyze it using proprietary techniques. ELSs would provide an easy-to-use collaborative environment to exchange this information but current technologies cannot be used without potentially violating customer privacy and revealing the proprietary techniques. At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) we have developed a novel technology – SELS, Secure E-mail List Services – that provides confidentiality, integrity, and authentication for ELSs and is compatible with existing e-mail standards/systems. We are implementing a prototype that works with a wide range of e-mail client software and provides easy-to-install plug-ins for commonly used list servers. SELS provides security for information assets as well as privacy for user/employee information by encrypting sensitive information and ensuring only authorized users can access it. We provide this capability using a common communication medium – ELSs – and with minimal overhead on existing e-mail systems.

SELS is funded by the Office of Naval Research under the NCASSR program.

Staff

· Rafael Bonilla (Former member), NCSA

· Hyung-Seok Hahm (Former member), NCSA

· Jin Heo, NCSA

· Himanshu Khurana (PI), NCSA

· Meenal Pant, NCSA

· Adam Slagell (Former member), NCSA

Publications

· Himanshu Khurana and Hyung-Seok Hahm. Certified Mailing Lists. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Communication, Information, Computer and Communication Security (ASIACCS'06), Taipei, Taiwan, March 2006.

· Himanshu Khurana, Adam Slagell, and Rafael Bonilla. SELS: A Secure E-mail List Service. In proceedings of the Security Track of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), March 2005.

Presentations

· Himanshu Khurana, Minimizing Trust Liabilities in Secure Messaging Infrastructures, CERIAS Seminar, Purdue University, August 2005.

· Himanshu Khurana, SELS: Secure Email List Services . NCSA Private Sector Program Annual Meeting, Urbana, IL, May 2005.

· Himanshu Khurana, SELS: Secure Email List Services . 5-minute abstract talk. IEEE Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 2005.

· Adam Slagell, SELS: Secure Email List Services . ACM SAC, Santa Fe, NM, March 2005.

· Himanshu Khurana, SELS: A Secure E-mail List Service . UIUC Security Seminar Series. Nov 2004.

Experiments

· Using Secure Email with GnuPG and S/MIME

For More Information

For more information on this project please contact Himanshu Khurana (hkhurana at ncsa dot uiuc dot edu).