Patent ID: 8751808

Claim:
A method for enabling two or more parties to share contact information by sharing a whitelist without revealing the content of said whitelist and for permitting a party sharing such a whitelist to identify a received message as coming from a trusted sender, the method comprising the steps of: (i) creating a whitelist of encrypted addresses of trusted users that are approved for sending messages using a one-way encryption method producing an encrypted sender's address, wherein the one-way encryption method can produce an encrypted address from a non-encrypted address but the non-encrypted address cannot be determined based on the encrypted address; (ii) sharing said whitelist of encrypted addresses of trusted users among two or more parties; (iii) when a message to be approved is received by a party sharing said whitelist of encrypted addresses of trusted users, extracting from the message its sender's address; (iv) encrypting said sender's address according to the same one-way encryption method used in step (i), thereby producing an encrypted senders address; and (v) verifying if said encrypted sender's address is present in said whitelist containing encrypted addresses of trusted sender addresses encrypted by said one-way encryption method and identifying a received message as coming from a trusted sender only if said encrypted sender's address is present in said whitelist of encrypted addresses of trusted users.