Electronic Postage Systems

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of contemporary systems for secure electronic/digital postage. It introduces a taxonomy of electronic postage systems and explains their security risks and countermeasures. The underlying cryptographic mechanisms are introduced and explained, and the industrial-scale electronic postage systems existing worldwide are sorted out with respect to this taxonomy. The author also discusses privacy and anonymous mail, the state of standardization of electronic postage, and the process of security evaluation and testing of electronic postage systems.

As senior cryptography architect, Gerrit Bleumer has designed the global cryptographic architecture of Francotyp-Postalia (FP), Birkenwerder (Berlin), Germany, which tracks the transport and delivery of cryptographic modules worldwide and supports postage meters from their initialization to removal from market. Since 2004, he heads the department of innovations management and product quality of the research and development division of Francotyp-Postalia. He has served on the advisory board of the Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security edited by Henk van Tilborg, and for several years on the program committee of the International Network Conference and the Workshop for Secure Data Management held in combination with VLDB. In 1991, he received a diploma in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. From 1991 to 1996, he worked as research associate in several research projects in security of health care informatics funded by the Commission of the European Union. From 1997 to 1999, he was senior technical staff member at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, NJ. In 2001 he received a Doctorate in computer science from the University of Dortmund, Germany.