Secure and Resilient Peer-to-Peer Email: Design and Implementation

E-mail is a mission-critical communication function for virtually all institutions. Modern e-mail employs a servercentric design, in which the user is critically dependent on her mail server. In this paper we present a peer-to-peer (P2P) email architecture that eliminates the need to rely on a single server and boosts the resilience of email against any kinds of attacks. Our architecture also provides confidential communications for all users. We present how the basic mechanisms of sending and reading email are implemented in our architecture. We also consider additional schemes to improve anonymity in our architecture. We present our prototype implementation and discuss the future of P2P communication architectures