WSEmail
Published in Service Oriented Computing and Applications , 2020
Web services offer an opportunity to redesign a variety of older systems to exploit the advantages of a flexible, extensible, secure set of standards. In this work, we revisit WSEmail, a system proposed over 10 years ago to improve email by redesigning it as a family of web services. WSEmail offers an alternative vision of how instant messaging and email services could have evolved, offering security, extensibility, and openness in a distributed environment instead of the hardened walled gardens that today’s rich messaging systems have become. WSEmail’s architecture, especially its automatic plug-in download feature, allows for rich extensions without changing the base protocol or libraries. We demonstrate WSEmail’s flexibility using three business use cases: secure channel instant messaging, business workflows with routed forms, and on-demand attachments. Since increased flexibility often mitigates against security and performance, we designed WSEmail with security in mind and formally proved the security of one of its core protocols (on-demand attachments) using the TulaFale and ProVerif automated proof tools. We provide performance measurements for WSEmail functions in a prototype we implemented using .NET. Our experiments show a latency of about a quarter of a second per transaction under load.
Recommended citation: May, M.J., Lux, K.D. & Gunter, C.A. 2020. WSEmail in Service Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA) 14, 5–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-019-00283-9
Download Paper | Download Bibtex