Information transmission security method

1. A method for securing transmission of information in a communication network having a plurality of nodes, the method comprising the steps of:

encoding the information with a given code, by an information transmitting node;

adding an error of given weight to the encoded information;

dividing the encoded information and the error of given weight into a predetermined plurality of portions that are substantially equal to a predetermined number r of independent paths in the communication network to transmit the information in the network;

encrypting a destination address of a destination node;

associating a control information item for each portion, in order to reconstruct a message at the destination node and the encrypted destination address; and

sending in parallel, over the r independent paths of the communication network, sets of data comprising a portion of the encoded information, the encrypted destination address and the control information item.

2. The method as claimed in claim 1 , further comprising the step of using a Reed-Solomon code to encode the piece information to be transmitted.

3. The method as claimed in claim 1 , further comprising the steps of:

evaluating a capacity of a transmission channel; and

adding a random error of fixed weight to the information, wherein the random error is dependent on a quality of this channel.

4. The method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the step of encrypting comprises encrypting the destination addresses of the destination node by use of a public key encryption system.

5. The method as claimed in claim 4 , further comprising the steps of:

generating a public key steps of:

calculating a block matrix multiplication of RI with NG, to produce an intermediate product;

calculating a matrix multiplication of the intermediate product with RP, to produce the public key,

wherein:

RI comprises a random invertible matrix used to form a first private key;

NG comprises a public key generation matrix having a plurality of elements G arranged as u columns and u rows, wherein each element G comprises a code generation matrix; and

RP comprises a matrix obtained by random permutation used to form a second private key; and

encoding information transmitted in the network by use of the public key and at least one of the first and second private keys.

6. The method as claimed in claim 5 , further comprising a step of eliminating one or more predetermined columns of the public key generation matrix in order to reduce the size of the public key generation matrix.

7. The method as claimed in claim 6 , wherein:

a number of columns eliminated in the public key generation matrix is equal in all blocks forming the matrix NG; and

a number of columns to be eliminated is determined from a decoding algorithm.

8. The method as claimed claim 1 , wherein a portion of the information to be encrypted is incorporated into a random error added before the information is encoded.

9. The method as claimed in claim 6 , wherein the method decodes encoded information by applying the steps of:

decoding the encoded message initially by the second private key by use of an inverse matrix of RP;

repeating the decoding step u times for each of the u messages m;

decoding messages m[i] for index i varying from 1 to u;

for each of the eliminated columns, execute the following steps for i within [0 . . . u2 m −1]:

setting m[i]=0 if i corresponds to an eliminated column;

if i does not correspond to an eliminated column, then setting m[i]=(−1) Tab[t] , wherein Tab[t] corresponds to a predetermined vector; and

incrementing t by a value of one; and

applying the first private key RI, by using its inverse matrix (RI) −1 to obtain the final decoded message,

wherein m is a parameter of the Reed-Muller code, and 2 m is a length of the Reed-Muller code.