E-mail certification service

Abstract

A method is provided to handle an electronic mail message such that the receiver of the e-mail message can verify the integrity of the message. A request is provided from a sender's side to a service. The request includes information regarding the e-mail message. The service processes at least a portion of the request to generate a result. For example, the service may encrypt the portion of the request, according to a public / private key encryption scheme, to generate a digital signature as the result. The service provides the result to the sender's side. At the sender's side, the result is incorporated into the e-mail message and the result-incorporated message is transmitted via an e-mail system. At the receiver's side, the result-incorporated e-mail message is processed to assess the integrity of the received e-mail message.

Description

BACKGROUND [0001] The present patent application is in the field of electronic mail and, more particularly, is directed to verification, by a receiver of an e-mail message, of the integrity of the received e-mail message. [0002] Electronic mail has become a useful tool in our personal and business lives. Unfortunately, like other useful technologies, it has also become an intrusion. For example, only the most diligent among us are able to avoid scurrilous attempts to sell us nutritional supplements, mortgages, pornography and numerous other “products.” More recently, scammers have taken to using “spoof” e-mails in an illegitimate attempt to gain access to our personal information. For example, such scammers have spoofed BestBuy and eBay, attempting to entice unsuspecting users into providing personal information such as social security numbers and credit card numbers. Thus, as useful as e-mail has proven to be in our lives, it can be dangerous to blindly assume that received e-mail ...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The patent describes a method for ensuring the integrity of an email message. A sender requests a service to handle the email message, providing information about it. The service encrypts a portion of the request to create a digital signature. The result is sent back to the sender, who then sends the email message with the result incorporated in it. The receiver of the email message processes the result to verify the integrity of the message. This ensures that the email message has not been tampered with during transmission."

Problems solved by technology

Unfortunately, like other useful technologies, it has also become an intrusion.

Thus, as useful as e-mail has proven to be in our lives, it can be dangerous to blindly assume that received e-mail is legitimate.

However, efforts at minimizing intrusion of technologies often unavoidably diminish the usefulness of the technology whose intrusion we are seeking to minimize.

Users must carefully scrutinize the caught e-mail messages, lest any of them be legitimate and unintentionally ignored.

Also, spoof e-mail messages are more difficult to detect, as they appear in many respects to be legitimate.

Because Sundsted employs “stamps” having monetary value associated with them, there is a practical requirement (which is difficult to achieve) that the system to exchange value be secured against fraud.

Furthermore, even if the system to exchange value can be made secure, there is nothing that allows a receiver of e-mail to discriminate between senders from whom it is desirable to receive e-mail and senders from who it is undesirable to receive e-mail apart from the monetary benefit to the receiver who reads e-mail.

Perhaps even more significantly, nothing in the electronic stamp allows one to assess the integrity of the e-mail.

A drawback of HashCash, then, is that anyone who is willing to undergo the computational burden can send e-mail messages unimpeded.

That is, like the system described in the Sundsted patent, there is nothing in the token that allows the receiving side to discriminate between senders from whom it is desirable to receive e-mail and senders from whom it is undesirable to receive e-mail, beyond verifying that the sender did, in fact, incur the computational expense to generate the HashCash token.

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