Digital Forensic Analysis of E-Mails: A Trusted E-Mail Protocol

E-mail has revolutionized business, academic, and personal communication The advantages of e-mail include speedy delivery, ease of communication, cost effectiveness, geographical independence, and the portability of mailboxes. The last two are the biggest advantages over snail mail. However, with e-mail comes the threat of a genuine user being compromised through key loggers, social engineering, shoulder surfing, password guessing and other similar, though less technical, methods. This passive espionage can have a direct impact on the genuine user in terms of denial of information, loss of money, loss of time, mental harassment and an attack of personal privacy. To enable digital forensic analysis of e-mails, we propose behavioral biometric based authentication, which is analogous to a signature in paper documents. In the proposed system, if someone other than a genuine user tries to authenticate himself, then detection and fixing is possible.