International Business Machines Corporation

Peter John Stretton

Gary Paul Noble

Nicholas Raymond Bailey

Margaret Ann Beynon

A method for securely transmitting data from a sender computer system to a receiver computer system comprises receiving cleartext message by a first intelligent agent environment; splitting said message into a plurality of message fragments; creating an intelligent agent for each message fragment; generating a key for each message fragment; encrypting each said message fragment to produce a respective encrypted message fragment; and transmitting each intelligent agent with said respective encrypted message fragment as a data payload. The method may further comprise receiving each intelligent agent with its respective encrypted message fragment as a data payload by a second intelligent agent environment at the receiver computer system; locating each of a set of agents; decrypting each encrypted respective message fragment to produce a respective cleartext message fragment; and collaborating by the set of agents to recombine cleartext message fragments to form a cleartext message.

Collaborative agent encryption and decryption

A mobile intelligent agent is used in a Byzantine fault-tolerant computing network. The mobile intelligent agent ensures that only a single instance of the mobile intelligent agent performs processing in the processing host. The agent interrogates an environment in the processing host for presence of a sibling mobile intelligent agent or a trace left by a sibling mobile intelligent agent. If a sibling mobile intelligent agent or a trace left by a sibling mobile intelligent agent is detected, further execution by the mobile intelligent agent in the processing host is ended. The agent will then be forwarded onward to find a processing host wherein the agent has not been executed.

Byzantine fault-tolerance in distributed computing networks

A data storage system and method for operating the data storage system. The data storage system includes an active data store that contains stored data, a rules engine, and a unified container layer. The rules engine receives a first portion of the stored data from the active data store and apply at least one rule to modify the received first portion of the stored data, resulting in a generation of modified data by the rules engine. The unified container layer: receives and validates the modified data generated by the rules engine, transmits the validated modified data to the active data store, validates external data received from an external source that is external to the data storage system, and transmits the validated external data to the active data store.

Data storage system having a unified container layer for an active data store

A method, apparatus and computer program product for transmitting data secures the data by adaptively transforming it and spreading the transformed data piecewise over plural transmission channels. The method, apparatus and computer program product may select low-cost channels preferentially to transmit greater amounts of the data; may disorder the data and transmit ordering information separately over a preferred channel of higher security; may conceal data in a lower-security channel by steganographic methods; and may conceal the sequence of the data by placing segments of it statically, for example, in a WWW website, while providing sequencing data on the preferred channel of higher security. A receiving method, apparatus and computer program product may also be provided for recovering information content from signals on the plural channels.

Secure transmission using adaptive transformation and plural channels

The present invention provides a data storage system, method and computer program product having an active data store and a data communication mechanism comprising a unified container layer for validating both externally-generated data and data generated within the active data store, wherein the unified container layer transmits and receives data using the data communication mechanism. In a preferred embodiment, the active data store is an entity-relationship-attribute data store which comprises a relational database. The unified container layer may validate data using a syntax checker and a semantics checker, which may comprise a rules engine. Preferably, the data communication mechanism is one of a publish/subscribe system, a synchronous communication system, and an asynchronous communication system.

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Chandlers Ford, United Kingdom

Peter John Stretton