1. Simple to Understand

If you overlay one file on another, the contents of the latter may be easily obscured. This simple phenomenan can be used as a new encryption method. Just to refine it, we apply fractal encoding on the first file to generate a hidden encryption key to scramble the second file. And that is why we call it "Fractal Encryption."

2. Easy to Implement

Since the principle is simple, it should be easy to implement this new method. We will provide a web-page style package, which uses Active-X technology, for you to verify its functions. We will develop Fractal Encryption applications for major platforms such as Windows, iMac, iPhone, iPad, and Linux.

3. Rapid to Deploy

Just distribute your package to every authorized user as you normally do. Every user can choose his/her own key file independently. Or as an organization, you may establish your own policy centrally on who should use which key file.

What is Fractal Encryption?

Fractal is a mathematical term to denote the nature of a representation of an image, an object with detail at all scales, and is used for image compression and encoding. The term fractal was coined by Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975.

Hence, this should lead to a new way of encoding images, and if any file can be considered as an image, this new method can be used to encode files.

At present, files to be encoded are not user files, but key files. We apply the fractal theory to a user-selectable key file to generate a hidden encryption key, which is then used to scramble a user file to be protected.

So, what a user need to do is:
1. Select a key file.
2. Select a user file to be protected.
3. Perform fractal encryption to generate a scrambled user file.

How does it differ?

The traditional encrytion is based on the number theory and depends upon the fact that the product of two large prime numbers is very difficult to factor. Users are given such large prime numbers as private and public keys.

This method works very well, but there will be a limit of prime numbers given to users.

On the contrary, the fractal method uses "image" compression to generate "private" keys, there is no limit in the number of key files user can select from. And any user can choose his/her own key files, not given by somebody else. Users can change their key files any time when they want to, or when they need to. Organizations may enforce policy on who should use which key file.

Applications

1. File Archiving

This is the most common application to store user files online or offline. The key files need to be only known to owners.

2. File Transfer

When transferring user files to other people, those partners also need to know the key files.

3. File Streaming

The key files need to be embedded both in sending and receiving devices.

EXAMPLE: NEW METHODS FOR PROTECTING VITAL INFORMATION IN CLOUD COMPUTING

In this new age of cloud computing, when placing user files into the "cloud", we need some handy method for scrambling the contents of those files, so that we can feel assured that nobody can peep into our important files when they are in the "cloud".

Then what can be a handy method to do so?

There have been several encryption methods such as
- Cryptographic Apparatus and Method (U.S. Patent No. 4,200,770),
- Public Key Cryptographic Apparatus and Method (4,218,582),
- Exponentation cryptographic Apparatus and Method (4,424,414),
- Cryprographic Communications System and Method (4,405,829),
- Method for Identifying Subscribers and for Generating and Verifying Electronic Signatures in a Data Exchange System (4,995,082).

However, the prior art as such requires a great amount of computation in encryption and decryption.

In addition, in order to improve security, the number of bits in a key must be increased, which would further lengthen the computation time and complicate the logic to implement the algorithm.

How does it work?

Our Fractal Encryption uses theoretically undecipherable encoding method based on the fractal theory. In general, any of such methods is used mainly for image compression (because they were invented for such), which are proved not to be completely decoded (there is no way to restore complete original images; Refer to Fractal Image Compression - Theory And Application, Editor Yuval Fisher, published by Springer-Verlag, 1994).

In general, image compression is applied to a square part of the original image.

In our Fractal Encryption, this image compression is applied to user-selectable key file (such as image, video, and music, whatever a user prefers) to generate a hidden encryption key. In this case, the first 2^2n bytes of a key file is used. The higher the "n" is, the stronger the key becomes. Then, this hidden encryption key is used to scramble a user file in question. At present, scrambling is done by addition without carry, and descrambling is done by subtraction on a byte-by-byte basis, called MODULO-256. Thus, file size will not change.

Any key file will generate a corresponding hidden encryption key, which can be considered unique because we don't know where other exactly same key files (at least, first 2^2n bytes) exist.

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