Electronic Postage Systems

As postal liberalization gains momentum, traditional postage meter markets are being transformed into digital meter markets for enterprise mailers. Modern technologies such as cryptography, digital signatures, hardware security devices, the Internet, 2D bar codes, and high-speed scanning equipment have come together to establish different flavors of electronic postage, addressing the needs of postal operators, private carriers and mailers.

Electronic Postage Systems: Technology, Security, Economics 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.

Electronic Postage Systems: Technology, Security, Economic targets practitioners and researchers, including electronic postage designers of postal operators and standardization bodies, software and test engineers, software vendors integrating electronic postage solutions into their applications, security engineers and cryptography experts, and accredited test laboratories evaluating electronic postage systems. This volume is also suitable for graduate-level students in computer science who have an interest in security and electronic commerce.

Foreword by Wayne Wilkerson, former Manager, Postage Technology Management, United States Postal Service

About the Author


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.