Email is Silly — Owning Your Own Email Address

Our email system is silly and is responsible for the majority of our cybersecurity hacks. Why? Well, email is almost completely unauthenticated and is not private. These days, we would expect our messages to be encrypted and digitally signed, but email still trundles along being open to those who want to pretend to be someone else, and who can gain access to read our emails.

Any you do not own your email address! Like it or not, you are tied to whichever email provider you trust, and that sticks. But what if that provider removed your email address? Well, you would likely not be able to log into a system, or lose all your emails. Like it or not, your email address is much more important than a thing to get emails. The real power of the Internet is actually in the hands of just a few companies, such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. Within an instance, your whole trace of your online activity could be wiped out.

Several decades ago, Adi Shamir came up with the idea of IBE (Identity-Based Encryption), and where we could use a public identifier to encrypt data, and then which was decrypted with the associated private key. This, though, needs a central server which is able to translate the public key entity into a private key. This centralised server could thus be a point of failure or could be susceptible to attack.