Personalized Security Tokens for Anti-Phishing Email Verification
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Solution Overview
Problem
The proliferation of phishing communications has led to user hesitation in responding to or interacting with legitimate electronic communications, as users are suspicious of potential phishing attempts, resulting in missed responses to legitimate messages.
Innovation Solution
An anti-phish, personalized security token is injected into electronic communications, which is locally stored on user devices and can take the form of numeric codes, photographs, animations, or combinations, linked to a theme, and dynamically rotated, enabling users to select unique tokens for different communication channels, ensuring authenticity and confidence in message validity.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If users interact with electronic communications without verification, then response rate to legitimate communications improves, but susceptibility to phishing attacks increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary verification by injecting security tokens into legitimate communications before they reach users. The token injection system proactively authenticates communications and attaches verification markers, allowing users to quickly identify legitimate messages without manual verification, thus maintaining high response rates while ensuring security.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary security token system that mediates between legitimate senders and recipients. The token, injected by the token injection system and verified by the token verification system, acts as a trusted intermediary that proves the authenticity of the communication without requiring users to perform complex verification procedures.
2Ease of operation
If security tokens are stored centrally, then ease of access improves, but security and protection against harvesting worsens
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the token storage architecture into distributed client-side storage rather than centralized storage. Each user's device stores their own security tokens locally through the token storage system, eliminating the single point of failure that centralized storage would represent. This segmentation prevents attackers from harvesting all tokens from a single central repository.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements local quality by storing security tokens in distributed locations across multiple user devices rather than in a single central location. The token storage system places tokens locally on each client device, and the token verification system retrieves them from these distributed locations, providing both accessibility and security through geographic and architectural distribution.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods for securing an electronic communication is provided. Methods may, in a registration process, create and/or select an anti-phish, personalized, security token for a predetermined account on a computing device. Methods may generate a hash of the token, store the token and the hash in a secure storage location within the computing device. Methods may, in an in-use process, generate an electronic communication at a channel. The database may be interposed along the channel. Methods may forward the communication to a recipient associated with the account. Methods may intercept the communication at the database. Methods may select the hash from the database. Methods may generate an injected hash by injecting the hash into the communication. Methods may transmit the communication with the hash to the recipient. Methods may receive the electronic communication with the injected hash at the recipient. Methods may compare the injected hash to the stored hash. Methods may release and display the anti-phish token when the injected hash is equivalent to the stored hash.