SECURELY PUBLISHING USER PROFILE INFORMATION ACROSS A PUBLIC INSECURE INFRASTRUCTURE

摘要

The present invention utilizes existing encapsulation or encoding mechanisms for embedding user profile information in electronic messages. Such information may then be distributed amid a community of users for which an individual, organization or other entity interact. The present invention takes advantage of hidden fields, i.e., machine readable fields that contain metadata that by default are not presented at client user interface, for including the user profile information. The user profiles may be stored in a repository of user profiles, wherein a recipient of the user profiles may subsequently query the repository using keywords for accessing desired information about individuals or organizations for which they interact with.