Open and distributed systems to provide secure email service
First Claim
1. A system for providing a service to register email addresses and generate public/private key pairs for those email addresses so that they can be used for secure email communication, and for providing a service to automatically retrieve public keys for recipient email addresses and use them for encrypting emails sent to recipients.The system comprisesa registration server whichaccepts registration requests for a particular email address,checks for availability of the email address,enters a requested available email address into the mail server database,triggers public/private key generation for the mail address,triggers production of a customized software package containing the public/private key pair and mail agents for the user'"'"'s favorite mail clientsoffers delivery of that software package to the usera key server whichstores email addresses and the public keys associated with themresponds to requests for the public key associated with an email addressoptional mail servers to provide the standard email service for one or several domains
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Accused Products
Abstract
A system to ease secure email communication by providing a unique email address of a user'"'"'s choice, along with a private and public key pair which are generated and then associated with the email address. Along with the key pair, an plug-in to her preferred mail client is delivered to the user. The plug-in will allow for automatic retrieval of recipient'"'"'s public keys from a server and encryption of mails to recipients whose email address is associated with a public key. Also, the email plug-in will perform automatic decryption of incoming mail, if necessary, plus additional functionality based on the existence of public and private keys.
42 Citations
20 Claims
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1. A system for providing a service to register email addresses and generate public/private key pairs for those email addresses so that they can be used for secure email communication, and for providing a service to automatically retrieve public keys for recipient email addresses and use them for encrypting emails sent to recipients.
The system comprises a registration server which accepts registration requests for a particular email address, checks for availability of the email address, enters a requested available email address into the mail server database, triggers public/private key generation for the mail address, triggers production of a customized software package containing the public/private key pair and mail agents for the user'"'"'s favorite mail clients offers delivery of that software package to the user a key server which stores email addresses and the public keys associated with them responds to requests for the public key associated with an email address optional mail servers to provide the standard email service for one or several domains
Specification