In this paper, design of a sliding mode control (SMC)-based control scheme is proposed for hyperchaotic systems. Further, the proposed procedure is extended to study robust synchronisation and secure communication scheme for hyperchaotic systems in master-slave configuration. To achieve this goal, a proportional-integral (PI) switching surface is proposed to simplify the task of assigning the performance of the closed-loop error system in sliding motion. Having established the PI switching surface, a sliding mode controller is designed. The proposed controller guarantees the occurrence of sliding motion and achieves asymptotic synchronisation of hyperchaotic systems in masterslave configuration. Then, as an application, the proposed SMC scheme is applied to construct an hyperchaotic secure communication scheme. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed approach.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Singh, S. and Sharma, B.B. (2012) 'Sliding mode control-based stabilisation and secure communication scheme for hyperchaotic systems', Int.