SYSTEM AND METHOD OF SENDING AND RECEIVING SECRET MESSAGE CONTENT OVER A NETWORK

摘要

The proliferation of personal computing devices in recent years, especially mobile personal computing devices, has led to increased concerns regarding the safety and security of documents and messages that are sent over networks. Users desire a system that provides for the setting of custom, content-agnostic, permissions at a message, document, and/or sub-document-level through communications networks. Such a system may allow users to apply customized privacy settings and encryption keys differently to particular parts of documents and/or messages. Such a system may also allow the user to manipulate outgoing message objects of pre-existing formats, so as to “hide” the encrypted document and/or message content within one or more portions of the message object that are not displayed in existing message viewer applications, e.g., metadata fields or unused headers. As such, only authorized message viewing applications may know where to look for (and have the necessary keys to decrypt) such hidden content.

主权项

1. A non-transitory computer readable medium comprising computer executable instructions stored thereon to cause one or more processing units to:
receive first content corresponding to a document or message; determine a first message object format for the first content, the message object format having a first data structure comprising a plurality of portions, wherein one of the plurality of portions comprises a message body field; generate a first message object, the first message object having the determined first message object format; receive a first access permission setting for the first message object, wherein the first access permission setting comprises an encryption setting; receive a second access permission setting for the first message object, wherein the second access permission setting comprises an hiding setting; receive an indication of a first recipient for the first message object; generate a first encryption key for the first content based, at least in part, on the first access permission setting and the indicated first recipient of the first portion; encrypt the first content using the generated first encryption key for the first content; determine a first one or more portions of the first data structure of the first message object, wherein the determination of the first one or more portions is based, at least in part, on the second access permission setting and the first message object format, and wherein the determined first one or more portions do not comprise a message body field; store the encrypted first content in the determined first one or more portions of the first data structure of the first message object; determine a first delivery protocol for the first message object; and transmit the first message object to the first recipient using the determined first delivery protocol.