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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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For an e-mail message to be secure, it must be encrypted—scrambled

according to some kind of standard, such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) or

Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME). For the recipient to

read the e-mail message, he or she needs to have software that can

unscramble or decrypt the message. To ensure the sender and recipient alone

can access the contents of the e-mail message, both people need specific keys

that enable encryption and decryption. A key is a string of bits used by a

computer program to encrypt or decrypt data.

In practice, there are a few reasons a mobile device won’t be able to

decrypt an e-mail. The simplest of these is that the e-mail client or application

doesn’t support the encryption standard used to encrypt the message; the fix

may be a plugin or an entirely new client. Once you confirm that the e-mail

client or app supports this encryption method, follow any steps for

configuring the client to use it. Finally, the e-mail client will need access to

keys for decrypting the message. With some standards, keys may always be

exchanged manually; someone will need to contact the sender to exchange

keys. In other cases, keys may be exchanged automatically in at least some

circumstances (if you’re part of the same organization, for example).

Securing Mobile Devices

Just like any computer we use to input or access sensitive data and network

resources, we need to secure our mobile devices. Whether the device is

company-owned or personal, we still need to protect ourselves from the

needless inconvenience of easily prevented damage, theft, or malware

infections, as well as from the chance of important data being lost completely

or falling into the wrong hands.

BYOD Versus Corporate-Owned Devices

The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) war was briefly fought and lost by

organizations hoping to continue the long-held tradition that IT assets

belonged to (and were strictly controlled by) the company, not the individual.

As mobile devices proliferated, however, IT folks realized the genie was out

of the bottle; they couldn’t control these new technologies completely. Some

companies enforce a policy prohibiting the use of personal devices to access

corporate data and resources, particularly in high-security environments.

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