The Dark Mail Alliance is an organization dedicated to creating an

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...

and architecture with

end-to-end encryption End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. In principle, it prevents potential eavesdroppers – including telecom providers, Internet providers, malicious actors, and eve ...

. In October 2013,

Silent Circle Silent Circle is a German Eurodisco band formed in West Germany in 1985. The band consists of vocalist Martin Tychsen (Jo Jo Tyson), keyboardist & composer Axel Breitung, and drummer Jürgen Behrens (CC Behrens). History Silent Circle first ...

and

Lavabit Lavabit is an open-source encrypted webmail service, founded in 2004. The service suspended its operations on August 8, 2013 after the U.S. Federal Government ordered it to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys, in order to a ...

announced a project to create a more secure alternative to email and began a fundraising effort. The Dark Mail Alliance team consists of

Phil Zimmermann Philip R. Zimmermann (born 1954) is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. He is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used email encryption software in the world. He is also known for his work in VoIP encryptio ...

Jon Callas Jon Callas is an American computer security expert, software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle.http://www.linkedin.com/in/joncall ...

, Mike Janke, and

Ladar Levison Lavabit is an open-source encrypted webmail service, founded in 2004. The service suspended its operations on August 8, 2013 after the U.S. Federal Government ordered it to turn over its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) private keys, in order to a ...

DIME

Dark Internet Mail Environment (DIME) aims to be a secure communication platform for asynchronous messaging across the Internet. It was presented by Ladar Levison and Stephen Watt at

DEF CON DEF CON (also written as DEFCON, Defcon or DC) is a hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first DEF CON took place in June 1993 and today many attendees at DEF CON include computer security professionals, journalists, lawyer ...

on August 8, 2014.

Specifications

There have been multiple revisions for DIME specifications. The latest revision is presented as a preliminary draft. * First public revision, December 2014 * Preliminary draft, March 2015

Protocols

* Dark Mail Transfer Protocol (DMTP) * Dark Mail Access Protocol (DMAP)

Data formats

* Signet Data Format * Message Data Format ( D/

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Messa ...

)

Implementations

Server-side

Magma is the reference MIME server implementation. It supports server side encryption,

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typic ...

(SMTP),

Post Office Protocol In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most comm ...

(POP),

Internet Message Access Protocol In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal ...

(IMAP) and

Hypertext Transfer Protocol The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, w ...

(HTTP).

Client-side

Volcano, a Thunderbird fork with DIME support.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Dark Mail Alliance web site
Email Privacy of telecommunications Internet privacy organizations Computer security organizations 2013 establishments