We present a new chaotic masking scheme by using synchronized chaotic syste
ms. In this method, synchronization and message transmission phases are sep
arated, and while synchronization is achieved in the synchronization phases
, the message is only sent in message transmission phases. We show that if
synchronization is achieved exponentially fast, then under certain conditio
ns any message of any length could be transmitted and successfully recovere
d provided that the synchronization length is sufficiently long. We also sh
ow that the proposed scheme is robust with respect to noise and parameter m
ismatch under some mild conditions. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science
B.V.