Abstract: A system and method of automating the management of public and private key pairs of a sender and recipient of electronic messages over a network and for retrieving public keys of senders or recipients from secured servers, local key rings, PKI server, or Certificate Authority without requiring client-side software or user maintenance.

Abstract: A system and method of automating the management of public and private key pairs of a sender and recipient of electronic messages over a network and for retrieving public keys of senders or recipients from secured servers, local key rings, PKI server, or Certificate Authority without requiring client-side software or user maintenance.

Abstract: This invention is directed to a distributed database system for storing and publishing public and private keys of an encryption system. Through the use of a distributed database network, keys can be stored, associated with member's accounts, published, retrieved and utilized automatically without the necessity of the individual member managing the public or private keys. The distributed eliminates the necessity of the public or private keys from being located at a single location allowed the flexibility for a multitude of user to manage public and private keys.

Abstract: A system and method of verifying whether a certificate has been revoked by providing a DNS responder containing a certificate revocation list (CRL), parsing the CRL into DNS zones, and distributing this information to the respective primary DNS responders based upon DNS zones. Information about a specific certificate is gathered by querying a DNS responder for certificate validation information, receiving such information, and reporting the results of the queries to a client software application so that the user of the system can be informed as to whether the certificate has been revoked or not.

Abstract: A computer based message encryption system for transmitting encrypted message between a sending member of an internal messaging system and a receiving non-member or receiving member external user without requiring the sender or recipient member to maintain and support encryption key pairs themselves. An internal system that contains an external server for creating key pairs for message encryption between the senders and receives for the encryption of messages. The key pairs are encrypted themselves according to an encryption pass-phrase so that the pass-phrase may used to decrypt the key pair which in turn may be used to decrypt the message. In response to a predetermined time or destroy command, said encryption key pairs are destroyed.