Creating Digital Envelopes

Use digital envelopes to protect digital documents from being viewed by anyone other than the intended recipient.

Reasons for using digital envelopes include the following:

• You are sending confidential data or documents across (possibly) insecure communication lines.

• You are storing confidential data or documents, for example, company-internal reports.

• You have access to the public key of the intended recipient.

  How to obtain access to the public key depends on the public-key infrastructure of your organization.

• You have a digital document to protect.

As a business user, you indicate that you want to create an envelope for a document and the system does the rest.

The figure below illustrates what happens when you create a digital envelope.

1. The message is encrypted using symmetric encryption.

   Typically, a newly generated random message key (secret key) is used for the encryption.

   Symmetric encryption means that the same key (a secret key) is used for both encryption and decryption. Anyone wanting to decrypt the message needs access to this key.

2. To transfer the secret key between the parties, the secret key is encrypted using the public key of the recipient.

3. The encrypted document and the encrypted message key are packed together in a single data packet to save or send to the intended recipient.

The result is a secured digital document that only the owner of the corresponding private key can view.

For more information, see Opening Digital Envelopes.