A Secure File Encapsulation System for File Sharing in the Absence of a Trusted Channel

A Secure File Encapsulation Program for file sharing facilitates their access only by authorized parties by eliminating the need of a secure channel of transmission and also logs details of when and by whom the file has been accessed. The program is inspired by the concepts of objectoriented programming, specifically encapsulation and serialization, which is applied over a file to create a ‘container’. This containerization of the file is referred to as file encapsulation. This container consists of the encrypted file, along with unique identification attributes to ensure that the file is ‘decapsulated’, i.e., obtaining the file from the container, only by parties configured as receivers by the sender at the time of encapsulation and only within the program environment. While the general application is to enable secure file sharing without a trusted channel of transmission in any use case, the paper also describes how our secure file encapsulation system can be applied in digital forensics and medicine for facilitating access control of digital assets and logging their chain of custody. Further, it is briefly discussed how our encapsulation program, can also be integrated with other cryptographic techniques.