Blockchain Email Thread Hash Certification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing electronic communication systems face challenges in authenticating and securing email message threads, particularly in preventing tampering and maintaining the integrity of messages across multiple participants, which is crucial for trust and security in both personal and corporate communications.
Innovation Solution
A blockchain-driven certification system that stores the hash of an email thread in a blockchain each time it is modified, ensuring that any tampering can be verified, and uses digital contracts to govern the editing and distribution of messages, providing a trust certificate and preventing unauthorized changes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If electronic messages are shared across multiple participants through iterative communication, then communication efficiency and collaboration are improved, but message integrity and authenticity are compromised due to potential tampering and modifications
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by computing cryptographic hashes of message content and storing them in a blockchain before the message thread is fully distributed. This creates a preemptive integrity checkpoint that prevents future tampering without affecting communication flow. The hash is generated in advance and stored immutably, so when messages are shared iteratively across participants, the original state is already certified.
Solution Approach 2:
The blockchain acts as an intermediary between the email system and trust verification. Instead of participants directly verifying message authenticity through complex protocols, the blockchain serves as a neutral mediator that stores certified hashes. When integrity needs verification, the system queries the blockchain for the stored hash and compares it with the current message state, simplifying the trust mechanism while maintaining security.
2Reliability
If message threads are certified using blockchain technology, then message authenticity and trust are improved, but system complexity and computational overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the essential integrity verification function from the complex blockchain ecosystem. Instead of implementing a full blockchain node with consensus mechanisms and distributed storage, the email system extracts just the hash storage and retrieval functions. This allows the system to leverage blockchain's immutability guarantees while avoiding the complexity of running a complete blockchain implementation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates a simplified copy of blockchain functionality tailored for email certification. Rather than using the entire blockchain infrastructure, it implements a lightweight version that stores only message hashes and provides verification queries. This copied functionality maintains the trust properties of blockchain while reducing system complexity to only what is necessary for email integrity verification.
3Reliability
If cryptographic hashing is performed on every message modification, then tampering detection is improved, but processing time and energy consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies partial action by computing cryptographic hashes only for the specific message content that needs integrity verification, rather than hashing entire message threads or metadata. It hashes only the essential message body and key identifiers, which reduces computational overhead while still providing sufficient tampering detection for the most critical parts of the communication.
Data Source
AI summary
A communication system configured to provide blockchain-driven certification of iterative electronic communications such as e-mail-based communications. The system provides blockchain-driven certification by storing the hash of an e-mail thread in a blockchain each time the message or its elements are modified. This allows the system to verify whether or not the thread has been tampered with since it was last modified, when the last verified message was added to the thread. The system creates a baseline that is used towards creating trust certificates ensuring the recipients of such iterative electronic communications that the message has not been breached during its iterations that are shared between two or more parties, e.g., communications participants including senders and recipients.