Transmission control protocols (TCP) allow data to be sent, received, and reconstructed accurately between devices. Considering its common use in devices and applications, healthcare organizations often come face to face with TCP without even knowing it.
TCP is used in activities where accuracy and reliability are necessary like web browsing (HTTP/HTTPS), email (SMTP, IMAP, and POP3), and file transfers (FTP). According to Rfc 9293: Transmission control protocol, “CP provides a reliable, in-order, byte-stream service to applications…reliability consists of detecting packet losses (via sequence numbers) and errors (via per-segment checksums), as well as correction via retransmission.”
The commonality of its use stems from reliability despite sharing workloads with other protocols in some applications. It breaks data into packets, assigns them sequence numbers, and verifies their successful delivery. TCP can request lost or corrupted packets to ensure data integrity.
TCP provides reliable transmission of data between devices during email communication. When emails are sent TCP ensures that it is delivered correctly and checks for errors. The reliability is a basic step towards the encryption (taking the form of TLS) used by HIPAA compliant email platforms like Paubox.
Emails sent are protected firstly by TCP which acts as a base layer of protection for many applications. Further encryption provided by HIPAA compliant email ensures that the information sent by healthcare organziations is also unreadable without a description key. This allows for the security of protected health information (PHI) through transmission.
Related: Top 12 HIPAA compliant email services
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