Patent ID: 8681975

Claim:
A method of distributing a message from a message originating computing device through at least two separate intermediary computing devices to a message receiving computing device, the computing devices coupled in a sequence, the method comprising: at each particular intermediary computing device in the sequence of computing devices: receiving the message ciphered with a previous substitution cipher applied to the message on a previous computing device in the sequence of computing devices, the received message comprising a plurality of units, each unit including at least two bits of information; re-ciphering the received message with a composition cipher that comprises a composition of an inverse of the previous substitution cipher and a substitution cipher, associated with the particular intermediary computing device, that replaces each of a plurality of the units of the received message with a ciphered unit according to a predetermined system that maps different possible values for message units to different cipher values for the message units, wherein the composition cipher is part of a sequence of composition ciphers that are each for use on a different intermediary computing device, and wherein the composition ciphers conceal their constituent substitution ciphers and the inverse ciphers; and transmitting the re-ciphered message to a next computing device in the sequence of computing devices over a data connection.