Enhancing OTRMail extension for thunderbird to support secure email communications

• Main Author: Yak, Wei De
• Other Authors: Woo Wing Keong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/52127
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In our current society, electronic mails have become a common means for communicating with people. However as emails becomes more commonly used, security threats such as phishing starts to emerge. Through phishing, sensitive personal information can be leaked out unknowingly, thus there is a need for secure email communication to prevent such threats. The OTRMail was designed as an alternate secure email solution, as opposed to other email solutions which were already in use by the public. What makes OTRMail different from other email solutions is that it takes on a minimalist approach, in which users are required to make very little effort to establish secure email communication. OTRMail’s design may be simple and straight forward, but it does not lack in any means to fend off malicious threats such as man in the middle attacks. This project aims to enhance the OTRMail that was previously developed by other students. Core functions such as managing and refreshing of keys, which were missing in previous OTRMail, will be elaborated in this report. Changes made to its structure such as, making the code to adhere to Object Oriented Programming and the improvements it brings will also be discussed in this report. The OTRMail is also ensured to be compatible with the latest version of the Thunderbird email client. OTRMail now adapts a more commonly used reply format as opposed to previous versions where past message contents remain encrypted. In addition, exceptions which cause OTRMail to crash were fixed and hassle-free ways to view sent messages were also implemented. With these changes, OTRMail is now more stable and robust as compared to previous OTRMail. Solutions to problems faced during the integration of the OTRMail will also be discussed in this report. The OTRMail is believed to be capable of further improvements such as being able to decrypt HTML elements, providing this form of secure communication to a group based level instead of the one sender one recipient level it is currently at now. The content header component also has to be restructured to adapt to a format whereby it can differentiate attachments.