Confidentiality Performance of Spectral-Phase-Encoded
Thomas H. Shake
Abstract
Enhanced security has often been cited as an impor- tant benefit of optical code-division multiple-access (O-CDMA) signaling but has seldom been analyzed in detail. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the degree of confidentiality that can be provided by spectral-phase-encoded O-CDMA. Two eaves- dropping detector structures are presented that can theoretically break the confidentiality of spectral-phase-encoded signals by detecting the code words in use by a specific user. One of them, an optical beat detector, is quantitatively analyzed to determine the probability of correctly detecting user code words. The confiden- tiality of user signals is shown to be vulnerable to such a detector if an eavesdropper can isolate a single user signal with a sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). At lower SNRs, combining mul- tiple bits is shown to dramatically increase the probability of an eavesdropper correctly detecting user code words; even for codes long enough to strain implementation capabilities (e.g., 2048 code elements), the probability of correct detection is shown to rise from negligibly low values to virtually 100% by the combining of less than 100 transmitted bits at the eavesdropper's receiver. Index Terms—Code-division multiple access (CDMA), commu- nication system security, optical communication.