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What Is S/MIME and How Do I Install It on My iPhone?

Here’s what S/MIME means and how to install an S/MIME certificate on your iPhone

Wondering “what is S MIME?” or “what does S MIME mean on iPhone?” Or, perhaps, maybe you’re wondering how to install an S MIME certificate on your iPhone. Well, you’ve come to the right place. S MIME, typically written S/MIME, stands for secure/multipurpose internet mail extensions. It’s an email signing protocol that enhances email security by providing end-to-end encryption.

An S/MIME certificates allows you to:

  1. Digitally sign your email to ensure your recipient that it was sent by you and no one else. In technical terms, an S/MIME certificate allows your recipient to authenticate the message.
  2. Encrypt and decrypt your email messages before they’re ever sent.
  3. Maintain integrity of your messages/document by not allowing any unauthorized third party to tamper with the content of the email.

When it comes to security, S/MIME certificates works in tandem with TLS mail server encryption to go a step beyond email server encryption, which encrypts data in transit, to encrypt and protect the emails themselves that are stored on the servers.

What Is S/MIME Control

If you want to install the S/MIME control for Microsoft Outlook, follow the instructions given below:

  • Install S/MIME extension through Registry or Group Policy
  • Configure S/MIME extension
  • Download and install the S/MIME extension
  • Set up S/MIME setting in Outlook on web

How Does S/MIME Work?

An S/MIME certificate for an email is the modern-day equivalent of hand-signing a letter. When you send an email using S/MIME, it gets stamped with a digital signature that authenticates you. So when the recipient receives the email, the signature gets verified against the sender information and decrypted only if it’s found valid. This provides non-repudiation of origin.

S/MIME is based on asymmetric encryption. This encryption method involves two distinct — yet mathematically related — keys. One of these keys is called a public key and the other one is called a private key. When the sender sends an email using an S/MIME certificate, the email gets encrypted using the recipient’s public key. While the recipient can decrypt this message using the private key associated with the public key. No one else can decrypt the information. This means an email will stay secure so long as the private key isn’t compromised.

How to Install an S/MIME Certificate on an iPhone

If you’re an Apple iPhone user, you can install an S/MIME certificate on your device to secure your email communications. To do so, you’ll need to install an S/MIME certificate on your iPhone. Please note that you can install an S/MIME certificate only if you’re using an iPhone 5 or a newer model.

Here’s how you can install an S/MIME certificate on your iPhone:

  1. In your iPhone, open the email that consists of the certificate files (assuming that you’ve already completed the certificate generation process).
  2. Import the certificate file by following all the prompts and save the .p12 file to a location that you can easily recall.
  3. Open the file you just saved. Enter the password of your device.
  4. Now, you’ll be asked for the password that you created at the time of certificate creation. Enter it and proceed.

Now, your certificate is successfully installed on your iPhone.

Set Up an S/MIME Certificate on an iPhone

Once you’re done with the certificate installation process, it’s time to set up an S/MIME certificate on your iPhone.

  1. First, go to Settings and select Accounts & Passwords.   
  2. Now, select the account that you want to set up.
  3. Go to Advanced after selecting the specific account.
  4. Navigate to the S/MIME section and enable S/MIME.
  5. Enabled the sign toggle and select the S/MIME certificate you installed.

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What Is an S/MIME Certificate and How Does It Work?

Even though personal and business email communications are commonplace today, it continues to be one of the most vulnerable platforms in terms of security. Email security is a major concern for most businesses, as it’s often the weak point in their digital infrastructure. Some common email threats include eavesdropping, delivering malware through emails, address spoofing, phishing, etc.

People continue to fall prey to these attacks and spam, with technology not being able to filter out every scam email. It is, therefore, of utmost importance that we actively participate in ensuring secure email communication. S/MIME certificates (sometimes written as “S Mime certificates”) are a step in the right direction. With a Sectigo S/MIME certificate, for example, you can sign all your emails and encrypt them both in storage and in transit. In addition to securing your data at all times, this certificate also ensures that no one can impersonate you because your emails are digitally signed.

Let’s take a closer look at what an S/MIME certificate is and how it works.

What Is S/MIME Certificate?

RSA Data Security initially developed S/MIME, or what’s also known as secure/multipurpose internet mail extensions. It’s a protocol standard defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that enhances email security by allowing you to encrypt MIME data, aka emails.

Key Features of SMIME Certificate

  • Industry-standard for public key encryption (asymmetric encryption) for MIME-based data.
  • Offers two key email security functionalities — digital signatures and encryption.
  • Digital signatures provide message integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation.
  • Encryption provides data confidentiality (both for in-transit and at-rest data).

Because S/MIME uses asymmetric public key infrastructure (PKI), it employs two keys mathematically associated with each other to facilitates email security. By digitally signing your emails, the intended recipient can verify that the message was actually sent by you and hasn’t been tampered with or modified. When the email is en route from your computer to the recipient’s device, data encryption ensures that any attacker over the wire can’t read the contents of the message.

An SSL/TLS certificate installed on your email provider’s helps to facilitate a secure communication channel between you and your email server. However, it doesn’t encrypt your stored or archived emails, nor does it encrypt your emails in transit from other servers. Using an S/MIME certificate on client agents does away with both these drawbacks. Note that while SSL/TLS certificates are installed on servers, S/MIME certificates are installed on clients. Sectigo’s S/MIME certificates can be automatically deployed through a zero-touch deployment method into all mail clients.

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How Does an S/MIME Certificate Work?

We mentioned earlier that S/MIME certificates utilize asymmetric encryption. The graphic below illustrates how asymmetric encryption works to encrypt and decrypt plaintext information.

The Mechanism of S/MIME Certificate

Let’s understand how asymmetric encryption works using an example.

Consider that Ben wants to send an email to his friend Jerry but does not want anyone else on the network to read or modify it. Ben uses Jerry’s public key to encrypt the message. Anyone can have access to this public key. Therefore, Ben or anyone can encrypt the message they want to send to Jerry. An intruder on the network cannot make sense of this message, though, without the corresponding private key. The private key is only accessible to Jerry, so only he can decrypt and read the message. You can get an email signing certificate from a trusted certificate authority (CA) and use this to digitally sign your messages (the certificate is automatically attached to the mail) before sending it off. The way this works is as follows:

  • A digital signature is associated with two keys, a private key, and a public key.
  • Authentication is done using the public key, whereas the private key is used to generate the signature itself.
  • The public key is sent along with every protected email message to assert the identity of the sender.
  • The private key, on the other hand, generates and applies the unique digital signature to each email. Signatures verify that the message is unaltered and not tampered by an unauthorized third-party.