Secure Email With Fingerprint Recognition

Public key cryptographic techniques have been used to protect email messages via encryption and digital signatures for more than 26 years. Such techniques, however, failed to adopt secure email messaging due to a combination of technical, social, and usability issues. The authors present a new approach to email security that uses fingerprint recognition and cryptographic hash functions to secure access to email accounts and messages, and to sign and verify email messages. Their approach does not require doing expensive computations to verify a user's signature as opposed to public key cryptographically protected email. They keep the amount of user interaction required to the minimum, and provide email users with security features that include state-of-the-art biometric authentication schemes.