Abstract
As the complexity of computing increases, the demand for ensuring both secure and reliable systems becomes essential. This thesis was initiated by conducting a literature search and investigative survey of past and current cryptosystems suitable for varying applications in the computer world. Different error correction codes were also studied and surveyed in order to determine the most appropriate given the goals of the system. In order to evaluate the security and reliability of a given system one must look into how the system can be attacked and also how the system can fail. The results of the research motivated an improvement proposal as a new method for transmitting data in a secure and reliable manner. The new method involves taking a large message and splitting it into smaller sections before encrypting and sending. The state of the art cryptosystems that were studied had security vulnerabilities such as eavesdroppers listening in and also by brute force solving equations given pairs of information. These types of attacks could be avoided with a new structure of the transmission. Taking this into account, a new transmission method is proposed to split the large message into blocks before encoding. Partitioning the message and utilizing smaller key sizes lowers the overhead in terms of time, memory and bandwidth. For educational purposes, the proposed transmission uses the (7,4) Hamming Code to depict the encoding and decoding processes. This code is simple to understand and can correct any single error and detect two errors in a 4-bit data block.