Secure information transfer based on computing reservoir

There is a broad area of research to ensure that information is transmitted securely. Within this scope, chaos-based cryptography takes a prominent role due to its nonlinear properties. Using these properties, we propose a secure mechanism for transmitting data that relies on chaotic networks. We use a nonlinear on-off device to cipher the message, and the transfer entropy to retrieve it. We analyze the system capability for sending messages, and we obtain expressions for the operating time. We demonstrate the system efficiency for a wide range of parameters. We find similarities between our method and the reservoir computing. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.