Replacing email protocols with blockchain-based smart contracts
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Replacing email protocols with blockchain-based smart contracts Jose´ Chamadoira Gonza´lez1 • Vicente Garcı´a-Dı´az1 • Edward Rolando Nu´n˜ez-Valdez1 • Alberto Go´mez Go´mez2 Rube´n Gonza´lez Crespo3
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Received: 30 March 2020 / Revised: 26 April 2020 / Accepted: 6 May 2020 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Email services nowadays are flooded by spam and phishing attacks. Email service providers build their own email filters to protect the final users from such attacks resulting in an overall better experience. However, the attacks come mainly from the same problem in the email protocols, i.e., the lack of authentication mechanism. In this work, we attempt to minimize some of the most common problems identified in email services such as spam, phishing, spoofing, lack of encryption, repudiation and centralization by implementing a smart contract over the Ethereum protocol. The proposal involves a decentralized system, a smart contract, a file system and two applications used as proof of concept. Keywords Blockchain Distributed algorithm Email protocol Ethereum Smart contract
1 Introduction In 1971, Raymond Tomlinson extended the program SNDMSG allowing their users to send messages not only for users on the same machine, but to any other computer connected to the ARPANET [1]. Since then, E-Mail protocols have been updated constantly. POP3 and IMAP are the protocols used nowadays to receive email messages from servers. In addition, SMTP is used by servers to
& Rube´n Gonza´lez Crespo [email protected]; [email protected] Jose´ Chamadoira Gonza´lez [email protected] Vicente Garcı´a-Dı´az [email protected] Edward Rolando Nu´n˜ez-Valdez [email protected] Alberto Go´mez Go´mez [email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain
2
Department of Business Administration, University of Oviedo, Gijo´n, Spain
3
Department of Computer Science, International University of La Rioja, Madrid, Spain
transfer emails between them, and email clients use it for sending new mails [2]. Although these protocols have improved how we communicate, they still have problems. For example, the lack of any authentication mechanism, allowing the creation of email messages with forged sender address (spoofing). In addition, these protocols do not require the receiver of the message to previously grant the sender any permission to send him mails. That may be interesting in some contexts like corporative environments. These two characteristics lead to one of the biggest security threads, phishing, which combined with hacking account for 70% of cyber-attacks [3]. Another problem due to the lack of authentication is the lack of non-repudiation. Email services are centralized in servers, therefore users need to trust the ESPs (Email Service Providers) which will manage their email messages without encryption, as it is not established by the email protocols. This might incur into several probl
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