Trust Review » How Does S/MIME Work?

How Does S/MIME Work?

S/MIME enrollment requires a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) to provide key roles for the S/MIME enrollment:

Issuing an S/MIME Certificate from a Trusted Certificate Authority (CA)

A trusted Certificate Authority (CA) creates S/MIME certificates to bind S/MIME public keys to their owners. Each S/MIME certificate issued by a Certificate Authority uniquely identifies its owner. It contains the name of the certificate owner, the certificate’s expiration dates (or validity dates), the certificate owner’s S/MIME public key used for email signing and encryption, and the digital signature of the CA that issued the digital certificate to the certificate owner.

The CA verifies the validity build successful digital marketing with limited budget of an S/MIME certificate to prove to others that the certificate owner is who they say they are. To do this, the CA verifies the identity of the certificate owner by applying its own digital signature. The CA’s digital signature authenticates its identity as the issuer of the certificate, verifies that the certificate has not been altered since it was signed, and ties the certificate to the signing activity.

Digital certificate content

The CA must issue an S/MIME certificate for each user in your organization, and each S/MIME contains an S/MIME certificate (public key) and a private key for email signing and encryption purposes.

Publish S/MIME certificate (Public Key) to LDAP

To allow SMIME public key tech day 60, the focus of innovation in burgos distribution for email encryption, the CA publishes the S/MIME certificate (public key) in an LDAP directory such as Microsoft Active Directory. This allows users or employees to search and retrieve the recipient’s public key for email encryption. Email clients such as Outlook will automatically search and retrieve the recipient S/MIME certificate (public key) from the LDAP directory.

Escrow S/MIME private key

To facilitate SMIME private key recovery, SMIME private keys are held in escrow at the CA. When users lose their private keys, the email information encrypted with the corresponding public key is no longer accessible.

Delivering the SMIME certificate (Public Key) and Private Key to users

Once you receive your S/MIME public text services key (S/MIME certificate) and private key, usually in PKCS12 format, from the CA, you need to install and activate them in your email client before you can use S/MIME.

Which Email Clients Support S/MIME?

The following email clients support S/MIME:

  • Apple Mail
  • Gmail
  • iPhone iOS Mail
  • Android Samsung Email and Outlook Email
  • Microsoft Outlook and Outlook on the Web
  • Mozilla Thunderbird
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