Businesses with an online presence need robust measures to protect their authenticity and identity. We are living in a time where the global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is USD 4.88 million—a 10% increase over last year and the highest total ever. Statistics like these are already encouraging business owners to deploy cybersecurity measures. But sometimes, they use the terms email cybersecurity and email authentication interchangeably, which is wrong. The two terms are undoubtedly related to each other but are still different. This blog talks about these differences only.
Why should you even bother protecting your email infrastructure?
Yes, chats and DMs are conquering the world as a modern and more expressive means of communication. However, a large part of the corporate world still heavily relies on emails for internal and external communications. Be it getting approvals from your seniors on your reports or notifying order statuses to your customers, you have to compile emails.
So, emails are here to stay.
However, cybercriminals can exploit your email infrastructure to send fake, potentially fraudulent emails to people with the intention of extracting sensitive information or money. They may also use your brand’s domain to send emails with inactive malware hidden in links or attachments. If a recipient happens to click on a link or download a malicious file, the malware will be activated in their system.
Threat actors make all these spiteful attempts under the name of your business, so if someone falls for the trap, it’s your brand’s reputation that will take a toll. Plus, you and your brand can also land in legal and financial issues.
That’s why companies are encouraged to take email security seriously. So, let’s move on to touching base on email security and email authentication.
What does email security mean?
In simpler words, email security is what the term itself conveys- a strategized and holistic practice of securing email accounts and messages, links, attachments, etc., exchanged using them. It’s a sincere and well-invested effort to ensure the emails you send and receive are authorized, legitimate, and authentic.
The common components of email security are-
Antimalware
An antimalware program is a software installed on computers to prevent, detect, and remove malware (malicious software). Such a program prevents users from visiting a malware-infected website and also gives you insights into the number of infections on your system and the time required to remove them. New-age antimalware programs are capable of detecting user behavior anomalies to ascertain the presence of malware.
Spam filters
Spam filters use specific criteria to detect unsolicited, unwanted, and virus-infected emails and prevent their entry into your inbox. Different types of spam filters include content filters, header filters, language filters, and rule-based filters.
Secure Email Gateways (SEGs)
Secure Email Gateways use machine learning and signature analysis to identify and block inbound emails that are detected to have malicious content. They act as an inbound gateway for SMTP email traffic, where they replace the DNS MX record with that of the SEG proxy.
Encryption
Transport Layer Security (TLS) and End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) are the two commonly used encryption methods in emails. TLS secures email communications by encrypting the transmission between mail servers. E2EE encrypts the email content so only the sender and intended recipient can decrypt and read it. Solutions like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) are commonly used for this purpose.
Sandboxing
In the sandboxing technique, malicious email attachments are opened in a safe, isolated environment to check if they exhibit any dangerous behavior before delivering the emails to the inbox. By testing them in the safe (sandbox) environment, the other aspects of the email infrastructure remain secure.
Multi-factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentication prevents cyber actors from accessing your email account even after they have your password. It works by adding an additional layer of security over and above a standard password. The common MFA methods are OTPs, facial detection, authenticator apps, push notifications, and hardware tokens.
What does email authentication mean?
Email authentication is the process where you (the domain owner) deploy SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to help the receiving mail servers know if the emails sent from your domain are legitimate or not. Sometimes, threat actors break into one of the email accounts linked with your domain and send phishing and spoofing emails from them. But, if you have implemented SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, then the recipients’ mail servers will detect such emails as potentially fraudulent and won’t let them get placed in the inboxes.
Here’s what each of these email authentication protocols do to prevent phishing and spoofing–
SPF
SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. It allows you to create an SPF record and enlist all the IP addresses and mail servers you trust to be used to send emails on your behalf. Along with it, you use -all or ~all mechanism to instruct the receiving mailboxes to either reject the entry of emails from your domain that didn’t pass the SPF check or place them in the spam folder. It’s upto you which mechanism you want to apply.
DKIM
DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It allows senders to sign an email with a digital signature. This signature is added to the email’s headers and verified by the recipient’s mail server using the sender’s public key, ensuring the email’s integrity and confirming that it was sent from the claimed domain without being altered during transit.
DMARC
DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. It uses SPF and DKIM results to ensure the legitimacy of an email’s sender. It enables domain owners to specify how unauthenticated emails should be handled (e.g., rejected, quarantined) and provides reporting to help monitor and prevent email spoofing.
Email cybersecurity vs email authentication
Each of these is important and serves a different purpose; therefore, you can’t overlook either of them. A holistic and multi-angular approach is necessary to fortify email-based cyber menaces. Let’s see how these two are different from each other.
Scope
- Email cybersecurity: This includes various protections aimed at keeping email accounts, messages, and communications safe from threats like malware and data breaches.
- Email authentication: This component focuses on understanding the nature of the email’s origin. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC work in tandem to detect if the email was sent by an unauthorized and potentially fraudulent person. The aim of these protocols is to prevent phishing and spoofing attempted in the name of domain owners and the brands they own.
Solutions and techniques
- Email cybersecurity: It is done using a wide range of tools that are capable of combating different types of threats like ransomware attacks, BEC or Business Email Compromise attacks, SQL injection, etc.
- Email authentication: The technique involves creating TXT records. These records are added to your domain’s DNS to allow open access to receiving mailboxes to check whether an email from your domain is legitimate. By accessing the respective TXT records, mailboxes know what action to take with illegitimate emails sent from your domain.
End goals
- Email cybersecurity: The main goal is complete protection. Cybersecurity secures email content, accounts, and communication channels to keep sensitive information private and protect email systems from various threats.
- Email authentication: The main goal is trust. Authentication protocols verify email senders, helping recipients trust their emails. This boosts the sender’s credibility and protects against phishing attacks.
Challenges of email authentication?
As much as we encourage the adoption of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, we also advocate knowing their challenges so that you handle them with attention.
False positives and negatives
It’s possible that illegitimate emails pass the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks while the legitimate ones fail. This happens because of misconfigurations in SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Other factors that trigger false positives and negatives include poor sender reputation, low domain reputation, lack of multi-factor authentication setup, misalignment with third-party sender’s domain, email forwarding, overly permissive policies, overly strict policies, improper setup of reporting mechanisms, etc.
Complex records
Email authentication is a complex exercise that requires precise configurations and coordination across multiple systems. If things are a bit here and there, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC won’t function properly. What’s worse is that these protocols are highly sensitive, making them prone to error. If you miss enlisting even a single server that is officially used for sending emails on your behalf, then it will be a problem.
DKIM adds complexity with the need for cryptographic key management and ensuring the integrity of digital signatures across all sending domains and subdomains. DMARC further complicates this by tying SPF and DKIM policies together, demanding proper alignment between them and setting up enforcement rules. Additionally, these records must be continually monitored and updated as email infrastructure evolves, requiring expertise to maintain accuracy and avoid misconfigurations that could lead to legitimate emails being rejected or spoofed emails getting through.
Limited enforcement
Although most email service providers honor the senders’ SPF, DKIM, and DMARC settings, some don’t. Moreover, the policies and mechanisms you set can be overridden by the receiving mailbox’s internal policies.
How can we help?
We have a team of email authentication experts. If you feel confused or overwhelmed while implementing, monitoring, and adjusting the protocols, reach out to us for support.
