PGP and Sendmail Team for Policy-Based E-Mail Crypto

PGP Corporation announced the addition of several new partners in its PGP Alliance program last week, among them Sendmail. The new partnership between PGP Corp. and Sendmail will bring more context-aware, strong encryption to Sendmail's e-mail management offerings.

Sendmail produces a variety of enterprise-level e-mail products, including Mailstream Content Manager (MCM), which offers anti-spam, anti-virus, and policy management tools. PGP Corp. is well known for its encryption products, built on PGP, a form of public key encryption in common use for e-mail and file security.

PGP is commonly associated with individual e-mail exchanges: Users can encrypt or cryptographically sign messages using public keys, which are decipherable only by the intended recipient. The company also produces server offerings, which remove the need for some of the individual public key management tasks dealt with by users and offer transparent encryption and message signing.

According to Sendmail senior vice president John Stormer, the partnership is in early days, but already offers some integration between both PGP's server offerings and Sendmail's MCM.

According to Stormer, MCM offers "a common policy layer that can invoke any number of security policies, including PGP. If a message meets the conditions of a policy, it (MCM) pushes the message to an encryption server."

Policy conditions can be based on assorted context-sensitive rules such as who the sender and recipient of a given message are, whether or not the recipient will be able to process PGP-encrypted content, or what the message's contents are.

Stormer said a common customer use for this level of messaging encryption includes healthcare organizations trying to meet privacy requirements imposed by such legislation as HIPPA, as well as organizations interested in layers of network security besides the gateway and edge services, where focus has been traditionally placed. Stormer also said encrypted traffic with business partners is growing increasingly common.