[118668] in Cypherpunks
- Startup To Offer Security Software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (BPM Mixmaster Remailer)
Tue Oct 5 10:18:30 1999
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 06:30:00 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <199910051330.GAA14546@acid.bpm.ai>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: BPM Mixmaster Remailer <remailer@bpm.ai>
Reply-To: BPM Mixmaster Remailer <remailer@bpm.ai>
- Startup To Offer Security Software
QVTech Inc., an E-mail software startup, unveiled yesterday Java-based
software that lets users encrypt, decrypt, and apply special security
policies to E-mail messages. With QVTech's Interosa, users can
password-protect encrypted messages, restrict domains to which
messages are sent, prevent recipients from copying, pasting, or printing
a message's contents and from forwarding messages to other parties,
and cause a message--and all copies of it that have been forwarded,
saved, or archived--to become unreadable after a specified amount of
time. "E-mail has a nasty tendency to get forwarded to where it doesn't
belong, and tends to last years and years," says Dale Goddard, a
QVTech product manager.
The Interosa software runs on a Windows NT server that's connected to
an SMTP-based messaging server, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus
Notes, or any Web-based messaging platform. The message and all
policies that pertain to it are sent as a Mime attachment.
"This opens up a lot possibilities, but it also raises a lot of issues about
E-mail that companies have not had to address," says Jonathan Penn, an
analyst at Giga Information Group. For example, securities firms are
required by the Federal Communications Commission to save messages
in a retrievable form for a minimum of seven years. But with Interosa a
sender could make a massage unprintable or cause it to expire in a
matter of months, says Penn. To address this, QVTech is developing
software that lets senders and recipients negotiate the details of
security policies associated with their E-mail, Goddard says.
QVTech will initially sell Interosa to application service providers such
as USA.net Inc. and United Messaging Inc., which both plan to offer
secure E-mail services based on Interosa by the end of the year. An
enterprise version of Interosa sold directly to corporations is expected to
be released next year. - Brain Riggs
