Enhanced IT security with S / MIME signing

The first and most obvious for you as a customer is that all communication from IA Warehouse is now sent from info@testing.awcohousing.com instead of info@industriarmatur.se.

This applies to both notification messages about, for example, maintenance of the SIPP unit and settings for user accounts.

"All messages from info@testing.awcohousing.com will be digitally signed via Global Sign. This is a step in the right direction in our IT security work. Via the signing, Global Sign has verified that we are the company we pretend to be and that also ensures that the message has not been tampered with on the way from us to the recipient."
- Malin Östbye, Technical Manager

Note that the app itself and SWH (web interface) will continue to look like before, domain industriarmatur.se. The update will take place later, planned for sometime during the first half of 2021.

S / MIME stands for "Secure / Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions". It is a standard for encrypting a so-called "public key" and for creating a digital signature for MIME data. Essentially, S / MIME uses a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) to register an email client for certificates of various kinds. It can use these certificates in a variety of tasks, but often for authentication and encryption purposes to prevent malicious actors from interfering with your communications.

There are few emails that are sent without any form of encryption nowadays, but standard email encryption (usually SMTP over TLS or STARTTLS) is not really comparable S / MIME, which uses "public key cryptography" for "end-to-end" "encryption.

Here is more information to read about S / MIME

"We use the S / MIME signing feature for emails from our SIPP management system, called Warehouse. The point is, GlobalSign (issuer of the S / MIME certificate) has verified that we are who we claim to be. / MIME signing means that we have signed (with our private key) that everything contained in the email comes from us and that the content has not been changed by anyone on the way to the recipient.

Should something have changed during transport, the S / MIME signature will no longer be correct. The S / MIME signature is checked by the mail client with the public key in the certificate, the mail client also checks online that the certificate (which is attached to the S / MIME signature) is valid and has not been revoked or the like.

This allows the customer to be completely confident that the information from us regarding their SIPP devices is correct and not an attempt by an outside party to exploit a weakness in their IT system. "
- Lennart Johanneson, Senior Developer at Gomero