Security for push-mail services

In addition to CEOs and globally active executives, sales forces, customer support teams, and other mobile workers who do not want to miss their mobile companions anymore appreciate the convenience and efficiency of push-mail services and have quickly adopted BlackBerry and other push-service devices. By now more than 3.5 million BlackBerry devices are used world-wide within companies.

The German Federal Agency for Information Security (BSI) issued a severe warning on the usage of these devices: “Due to the insecure architecture we can not recommend BlackBerry usage within security-sensitive areas of the government or companies threatened by espionage!” The key security issue is the root access of the push service to the mail infrastructure of the client.

Based on the expertise Utimaco has developed and on its established product SecurE-Mail Gateway, SafeGuard PushMail enhances this solution with an adaptive key server. SafeGuard PushMail enables customers to take control of security issues by guaranteeing comfortable and automatic encryption of all internal messages. SafeGuard PushMail:

• Encrypts all internal e-mails, whether or not the recipient already has a certificate
• Enables the transport encryption via the security standards S/MIME or OpenPGP
• Protects all messages by encrypted storage on the messaging server – illegitimate access is impossible

After the SafeGuard PushMail solution is implemented into the client’s mail infrastructure, any push service only has access to encrypted messages, therefore solving the security risks. This implementation has the big advantage that it is accomplished without any effort by the end user.