Patent ID: 7464171

Claim:
In a digital computing system in which a data source and a destination resource communicate with one another by transferring a stream of digital data, such as bits, blocks, packets or other data groupings, over a transmission medium that is accessible and thus potentially not secure, and wherein one or the other of the data source and the destination resource, or both, either lack the computational resources needed to perform encryption and decryption, or both, for the exchanged stream of digital data, or wherein one or the other of the data source and the destination resource, or both, are security constrained in the sense that a key needs to be transmitted to the destination resource in order to use the key to access the transferred digital data, but the key is susceptible to discovery via the accessible unsecure transmission medium, a method for protecting the exchanged stream of digital data from unauthorized access when transferring it over the unsecure transmission medium, comprising: at the data source of the digital computing system, altering the digital data stream to be transmitted by either interspersing false data into the data stream prior to its transmission, or by rearranging the sequence of transmission of individual data in the data stream, or both; transmitting the altered digital data stream over the unsecure transmission medium to the destination resource of the digital computing system; receiving the altered digital data stream at the destination resource of the digital computing system; at the destination resource of the digital computing system, reversing the alteration of the digital data stream by either removing false data that has been interspersed into the data stream, reversing the rearrangement of the sequence of transmission of individual data in the data stream, or both; and synchronizing the destination resource with the data source so that the destination resource is able to reverse the alteration of the digital data stream by using the synchronization to either correctly detect false data that has been interspersed into the data stream so that it can be removed, correctly detect the rearrangement of the sequence of transmission of individual data so the sequence can be returned to its original sequence prior to the rearrangement, or both.