Patent ID: 7484107

Claim:
A method for selective encryption of multiple sections within a document comprising: detecting a document encryption request; activating a document encryption routine; accessing a proposed document for encryption and tagging one or more sections of the proposed document as designated for encryption; encrypting the tagged sections with multiple encryption keys; extracting the plain text version of each encrypted sections from the document; marking locations in the document where the extracted sections were located; storing a copy of each encrypted section of the document for each key used in the encryption process, extracted sections from the document in an appendix attached to the document; receiving a request to access an encrypted section of the document; determining whether a received decryption key for the encrypted section of the document for which the access request was made is proper for that encrypted section, by selecting one of the encrypted copies of the document, selecting a key and attempting to decrypt the selected encrypted copies with the selected key by determining if a defined character string is in the selected copy of the encrypted section; when the determination is that the received decryption key is proper, retrieving and decrypting the section of the document for which the access request was made; and displaying the decrypted section of the document.