Network diversity technology secures Internet data

Amino Communications has released details of a patent-pending network diversity technology that enables sensitive information to be transmitted over the Internet securely without encryption.

Amino Communications has released details of a patent-pending network diversity technology that enables sensitive information to be transmitted over the Internet securely without encrypting the data.

Network diversity does not require cryptography but instead breaks up data into fragments smaller than characters or symbols and sends them over different networks.

Network diversity prevents piracy and fraud yet requires very little system resources and offers faster data transmission than the unprotected data.

Financial institutions, network carriers/operators and government agencies are organisations that would benefit from network diversity.

Implemented in conjunction with Nottingham University, mathematical modelling has shown the technology to be virtually impregnable.

Applying conventional strong encryption makes it possible to send data securely, to digitally sign it, to prove it was sent or received and to guarantee its integrity.

Unfortunately, the performance degradation associated with encryption processing discourages the transmission of large volumes of data over the Internet.

"The problem with encryption is that the entire message lies hidden in the cipher text so with enough ingenuity and computing resource, there is always the risk that it can be revealed", said Martyn Gilbert, CEO of Amino Communications.

"Anyone intercepting a network diversity communication will see incoherent and meaningless data because only a fragment of the original data is 'on the wire'".

Network diversity uses subsymbolic fragmentation to break data into fragments smaller than the base unit of data - the symbol.

So the letter "a" for example would be spread across more than one fragment.

Data fragments are sent over any number of parallel communications networks - these can include cable, satellite, ADSL, PSTN or wireless links - before coming together at the legitimate receiver.

This is the reconstruction point and a cryptographically secure algorithm is used to re-assemble the fragments into the original message.

The shared secret used to guide the reconstruction process can use conventional technologies such as PKI or smart cards.

The secret is a relatively small amount of information and, unlike the protected data, it need not be real time.

It is transmitted as infrequently as desired and does not burden the networks nor does it need high performance electronics.

The reconstruction point is as close to the recipient as possible.

Fragmented data can pass through a corporate firewall yet remain secure should the firewall be tapped.

A more likely situation is that a corporate would have a number of firewalls for the different communications networks.

Each network will only contain random, subsymbolic fragments of the original data.

This makes it a formidable challenge to any would-be hacker.

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