Correspondence: can e-mail be secure?
Can you be sure that the documents you get by e-mail are what the sender sent? One company thinks you can and the US patent office has issued a patent to support their contention.
It seemed like it would become a perennial problem: how to be sure that an e-mail had reached the correct recipient without being tampered with, and to be sure that a document arriving was both from where it purported to originate and was in its original form.
A US company, Post-X, thinks it has come up with a possible answer and its ideas have been granted a patent.
According to the patent, PostX has invented a system and method for confirming trade transactions in a secure and convenient manner via the Internet to end user e-mail boxes. An encrypted trade confirmation document is transmitted to the customer. The customer provides a personal password to decrypt the secure electronic envelope and view the trade confirmation. After the customer has opened the secure electronic envelope, a return receipt is transmitted back to the trade confirmation system to provide immediate notice to the organization that the electronic envelope was received and opened.
According to Post-X, the security is transparent to end-users, no complicated and costly client software or plug-ins are required and recipients may choose to receive secure communication either in their email inbox, through a secure web site or on their wireless device.
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