Homomorphic Encryption for Email Header Data Confidentiality
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing technologies face challenges in securely and efficiently encoding and transmitting data within email headers, particularly in ensuring that the data is only interpretable by authorized recipients while being operable by any recipient.
Innovation Solution
The method involves transmitting an email message with a header field containing homomorphically encrypted data, allowing authorized recipients to decrypt and process the data while maintaining security and operational functionality for all recipients.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If data is encrypted in email headers to ensure security, then data confidentiality is improved, but data operability by any recipient deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies homomorphic encryption to transform the data into an encrypted form that maintains computational properties. This allows the encrypted data to be processed (added, multiplied, compared) by any recipient without decryption, while still ensuring confidentiality. The encryption scheme changes the parameter of data accessibility from 'decrypted readable form' to 'encrypted computable form'.
2Reliability
If homomorphic encryption is used to maintain security, then data protection is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces homomorphic encryption as an intermediary mechanism between the sender and recipient. This intermediary cryptographic layer enables secure data transmission while allowing intermediate processing by email servers and recipients without requiring them to understand or manage the underlying decryption keys. The complexity is encapsulated in the encryption/decryption operations at the endpoints.
3Reliability
If encrypted data is transmitted in email headers, then security is improved, but processing efficiency by unauthorized systems deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the operational parameter of encrypted header data from 'requires decryption for processing' to 'processable in encrypted form'. Homomorphic encryption enables email servers to perform operations like routing decisions, spam filtering, and header validation directly on the encrypted data without decrypting it, thus maintaining processing efficiency while improving security.
Data Source
AI summary
Among other things, we describe techniques for carrying encoded data in a header field of an email message wherein the encoded data is homomorphically encrypted such that the encoded data is only interpretable by one or more authorized recipients and operable by any recipient. A recipient of such an email message (which may be the sender or another recipient) can derive an action to be carried out from the homomorphically-encrypted encoded data.