Non-symbolic fragmentation cryptographic algorithms

Non-symbolic fragmentation is an existing method for securing data. It has benefits over conventional cryptography and, due to its relative simplicity, can be made to execute very quickly. Fragmentation (in this research) refers to the breaking up of data into fragments of random length, followed by the sequential allocation of each of these fragments to one of a number of streams. This is called non-symbolic fragmentation when the fragment sizes are not necessarily a whole number of bytes in length and subsymbolic fragmentation if all of the fragment sizes are less than 8 bits in length. If a file is sub-symbolically fragmented then, as long as no two consecutive fragments are allocated to the same stream, each byte in the original file will not exist entirely within any one stream after fragmentation. If these streams are then sent over an unsecured network, anyone intercepting any one of these streams will not have obtained a single whole byte of the original data. Alternatively, if the streams are appended to one another to form a new file, the bits of each byte in the original file will not exist together at any single place in the new file. Non-symbolic fragmentation is currently under patent [GA01] and hence is a potentially commercial encryption system. The contributions of this thesis are: 1) The analysis of different variants of non-symbolic fragmentation, in terms of security and algorithm efficiency. 2) A comparison of the level of security provided, when compared to existing established cryptographic methods. 3) The refinement and expansion of existing prototype algorithms that have already been implemented using non-symbolic fragmentation. 4) The development of tools that measure the relative merits of non-symbolic fragmentation algorithms. In particular, a method is developed that relates the underlying non-symbolic fragmentation process to the research that has been done into the mathematics of card shuffling.