Patent ID: 7139399

Claim:
A system for providing public key cryptography including assistance in recovery of messages sent to users, the method comprising: a first key pair generated for a particular user, the first key pair comprising a public key employed for encrypting messages sent to the particular user and comprising a private key employed for decrypting messages which have been encrypted using the public key of the first key pair; a second key pair generated for message recovery, the second key pair comprising a public key employed for recovering messages which have been encrypted using the public key of the first key pair and comprising a private key employed for decrypting messages which have been encrypted using the public key of the second key pair; information referencing the public key of the second key pair embedded within the public key of the first key pair; and an encryption module automatically employing the public key of the second key pair during encryption of the message under the public key of the first key pair so that the message being encrypted can be directly decrypted using the private key of the second key pair.