What is email encryption and what types are there?

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Encoding the contents of sensitive emails prevents information leakage. So even if a threat actor gets hold of critical details, email encryption does not allow them to decode, understand, and misuse them to attempt malicious activities.

Additionally, encrypted email no longer requires special encryption software, as cloud-based interfaces are more readily available and offer greater efficiency.

The increase in the number of phishing attacks, data breaches, BEC scams, and other types of cybercrime has driven the demand for encrypted emails exchanged by businesses, government agencies, and individuals. Considering the rapidly growing cyber threats, regulators around the world have set strict regulations, including email encryption. Both factors are driving companies and individuals to take security measures to protect the content of emails, so the global email encryption market size is expected to soar to $16.3 billion.

However, small and medium-sized businesses are still lagging behind and not keeping up albania phone number data with cybersecurity trends, making themselves easy favorite targets for professional scammers. We at PowerDMARC are educating organizations and individuals on the seriousness and urgency of putting cybersecurity protocols and technologies in place. Let’s discuss 5 practical reasons why every company should care about email encryption, regardless of its size and operating style.

What is Email Encryption?
Email encryption is an email security process that prevents hackers and other unauthorized persons from reading the contents of emails you send by arranging the messages into an unintelligible format. The encrypted emails can then be decoded only on the intended recipient's end.

Email is fundamental to corporate communication, which means a large amount of sensitive and confidential company information as well as personally identifiable data is exchanged via email every day. Data breaches are a common threat to email communications, resulting in devastating breaches of company data, files, financial information, and even employee details. This makes email encryption a viable method for protecting email data.

Most major email providers support email encryption. For example, Gmail will only send and receive encrypted emails if the other email provider supports TLS encryption.

How are emails encrypted?
Email encryption can be done with the help of a variety of encryption methods and protocols. The process can be automatic, where all outgoing email traffic is encrypted, or manual, where only specific emails containing sensitive information or personally identifiable information (PII) are encrypted.

Email encryption can be facilitated by installing encryption software on your device, but more recently there are cloud-based hosted solutions and platforms that facilitate email encryption without requiring you to install any application on your operating system or device.

Read more about Email Encryption Architecture.

The two main email encryption methods
There are two main email encryption methods used:

1. Symmetric encryption
In this case, the encryption key and the decryption key are the same. While this is a very simple approach, it is often challenging to securely share keys between an email sender and an email receiver without compromising the privacy of the information.

2. Asymmetric or public key encryption
This is a more secure alternative to symmetric encryption methods as it requires different keys for encryption and decryption. A key pair contains a public key and a private key, where the public key is accessible to everyone but the private key can only be used by the key owner to decrypt the message.

Common types of email encryption
The three main types of email encryption are as follows:

Two main email encryption methods

1. Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
Pretty Good Privacy or PGP is a type of email encryption that uses a combination of two cryptographic frameworks - symmetric key cryptography and public key cryptography, allowing you to encrypt your email messages during the communication process. PGP is commonly used to encrypt sensitive files and emails and has a wide range of security features to ensure the privacy of your messages.

2. Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME)
S/MIME is another type of email encryption that can be used to encrypt email content and digitally sign it for authentication. S/MIME was created by RSA Data Security and requires a digital certificate from a trusted CA (Certificate Authority).

3. Transport Layer Security (TLS)
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an email encryption protocol that allows users to encrypt email content in transit so that messages are transmitted over a secure connection between two communicating servers. Email authentication protocols such as MTA-STS help implement TLS encryption to ensure that your email traffic is protected from network eavesdropping.

5 Ways Email Encryption Protects Your Business
In the simplest terms, protecting the attachments, links, and text of any emails that come in or out on behalf of your company should be your top priority. But if you’re still not convinced, keep reading to change your mind.

1. Data breaches are harmful to your business reputation
Unencrypted emails allow bad actors to extract sensitive information related to your business such as customer databases, employee details, marketing and PR strategies, financial and accounting tangles, etc. Now, do you think that your brand will not suffer in any way if any of this information is out in the market?

We don’t need to remind you that competing brands are always in their “improvisational shooting position” hunting you down by taking advantage of any bad move you make!

Imagine how badly your business reputation would be damaged if all newspapers and news channels were flashing how key details of your customers had been leaked and they had been duped into financial transactions in cyber criminals’ accounts.