Fine-Grained and Scalable Message Protection in Sensitive Organizations

Abstract

Today electronic messaging services are indispensable to individuals and organizations. If a message contains sensitive information, the integrity and confidentiality of the contents created by individual users should be maintained in an effective manner. Therefore, there is an urgent need for new mechanisms to support the requirement. In this paper we focus on the message protection in the organization-to-organization service, while many other researchers have worked on the person-to-person service. Our approaches can provide effective integrity verification, tracking mechanisms, and confidentiality at the user-level in a scalable manner with fine granularity. Furthermore, we use a set of session keys for each message to provide more secure communications, maintaining scalable key management by employing a key hierarchy. We describe the mechanisms of our approaches and show their feasibility by describing a prototype system that we developed.