Tightening the grip on message security

Prompted by government regulations, endless spam, and increasingly potent e-mail viruses, many enterprises are looking to tighten the cinch around messaging security.

To help organizations with secure message delivery, FrontBridge Technologies on Monday launched a managed service providing desktop-to-desktop encrypted e-mail. Through a partnership with Voltage Security, the FrontBridge Secure Email service leverages IBE (Identity-Based Encryption) technology, which uses the message recipient’s e-mail address to securely send and receive messages.

As opposed to complex encryption methods that rely on certificates, IBE can use any arbitrary string as a public key, protecting data without the need for certificates, according to Voltage officials. Protection is offered by a key server that controls the mapping of identities to decryption keys.

“A sender can send encrypted mail and when the user authenticates, they get the key automatically. Most of the time it is a more complex [process] to send secure e-mail,” said Dan Nadir, vice president of product management at FrontBridge.

According to Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, right now encrypted messaging tends to be a specialized need, with frequent uses within specific departments such as legal or HR. But as government regulations are enforced, use will become widespread.

“The market is quickly coalescing around this one-stop shop approach, where anti-spam, anti-virus, content filtering, disaster recovery, archiving, and secure messaging are all rolled into a single offering, so you can turn features on and off as you need them,” Osterman said.

Last week MailFrontier unwrapped its MailFrontier Appliance, combining anti-spam, anti-virus, and anti-phishing with rules creation and threat detection tools.

Earlier this month, a host of companies brought to market similar e-mail security tools. Postini launched its Perimeter Manager 5.0 e-mail intrusion prevention system, PostX unveiled Trusted Enterprise 5.0 for secure message delivery, and ZipLip rolled out its Pre-Review to monitor and block objectionable e-mails.