  The electronic mail plays an unavoidable role in the humankind
communications. With the great interest for the connection via mobile
platforms, and the growing number of vulnerabilities and attacks, it is
essential to provide suitable security solutions regarding the limitations of
resource restricted platforms. Although some solutions such as PGP and S/MIME
are currently available for the secure e-mail over the Internet, they are based
on traditional public key cryptography that involves huge computational costs.
In this paper, a new secure application-layer protocol, called SMEmail, is
introduced that provides several security attributes such as confidentiality,
integrity, authentication, non-repudiation, and forward secrecy of message
confidentiality for the electronic mails. SMEmail offers an elliptic
curve-based public key solution that uses public keys for the secure key
establishment of a symmetric encryption, and is so suitable for the resource
restricted platforms such as mobile phones.
