Secure e-mail

Secure e-mail communication with Rohde & Schwarz

E-mails have become an integral part of everyday life. For many years now, this medium has been used as a fast and uncomplicated way to communicate. Nevertheless, aspects that most people do not consider critical in their personal communications can be associated with substantial risks in business communications. As a communications media, e-mail is vulnerable to risks such as monitoring of e-mail content, faking of an e-mail identity, phishing or spam. Users are not always able to detect such threats at first glance. It is possible, for example, for third parties to read or falsify unsecured messages during transport. Furthermore, there is a danger of e-mails being misdirected or imitated without the sender or the recipient ever knowing that it happened. This can cause incalculable damage for both parties.

Making initial contact

When you initiate the communications

If you want to communicate securely with Rohde & Schwarz by e-mail, but have not been contacted by a Rohde & Schwarz employee first, you can use one of the following variants to call up the relevant S/MIME / PGP key material. You can look up public keys for Rohde & Schwarz employees via (see PDF "Secure E-mail Communications with Rohde & Schwarz", section 9): https://securemail.rohde-schwarz.com/requestKey.jsp

TLS/SMTPS:

• Using this option requires you to first get in touch with your Rohde & Schwarz contact.
• The communications for TLS/SMTPS are not accomplished using an MX record when exchanging e-mails with Rohde & Schwarz; instead, the dedicated mail system securemail.rohde-schwarz.com (IP: 80.246.41.42) is used.
• With STARTTLS, the communications take place via TCP port 25. Here, it must be ensured that both ends allow only TLS encryption.
• With SMTPS, the secure communications take place via TCP port 465.
• The SSL certificates that are used for the TLS protocol must have been issued by a public certification authority.
• No user-signed keys will be accepted.
• The keys must be at least 2048 bits long.
• The RC4 encryption algorithm is not supported.
• Session keys must be at least 128 bits long.
• The common names (CN) of the certificates that are used must correspond to the host names for the corresponding e-mail gateways.
• The mail server must be operated in your network and must not be hosted externally.