Chapter 7: Cryptography - Email Standards

The book describes three main email standards when it comes to cryptography. The first one is the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension. It's acronym is MIME, and it specifies how file types in email should be transferred and the handled by the recipient of the email. From my understanding, MIME is the reason that when you receive an email with an attachment, the file type is shown before even opening it most of the time. There is an extension to MIME, known as S/MIME where the S stands for secure. At a basic level, it allows for encryption of email and its attachments. It follows the Public Key Cryptography Standards and its algorithms. A second email standard is the PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy. A quote from the study guide describes it best: "I don't know you, but my buddy says you are all right, so I will trust you". It has become the de facto standard for the Internet. The third one is way more complex than the previous two...Quantum Cryptography. Photon polarization is used to represents bits for encryption.