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Journal of Optics

Cryptographic salting for security enhancement of double random phase encryption schemes

Alejandro Velez-Zea, John Fredy Barrera, Roberto Torroba

Published Aug 21, 2017• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Security in optical encryption techniques is a subject of great importance, especially in light of recent reports of successful attacks. We propose a new procedure to reinforce the ciphertexts generated in double random phase encrypting experimental setups. This ciphertext is protected by multiplexing with a ‘salt’ ciphertext coded with the same setup. We present an experimental implementation of the ‘salting’ technique. Thereafter, we analyze the resistance of the ‘salted’ ciphertext under some of the commonly known attacks reported in the literature, demonstrating the validity of our proposal.

DOI
10.1088/2040-8986/aa8738

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Abstract Security in optical encryption techniques is a subject of great importance, especially in light of recent reports of successful attacks. We propose a new procedure to reinforce the ciphertexts generated in double random phase encrypting experimental setups. This ciphertext is protected by multiplexing with a ‘salt’ ciphertext coded with the same setup. We present an experimental implementation of the ‘salting’ technique. Thereafter, we analyze the resistance of the ‘salted’ ciphertext under some of the commonly known attacks reported in the literature, demonstrating the validity of our proposal.
This paper analysis the security of the optical encryption scheme based on the classical double random phase encoding. We describe a known-plaintext attack which can be used to successfully access the encryption key with the pre-knowledge of only one arbiturary pair of known plaintext-ciphertext. A phase retrieval algorithm is employed in this attack. Computer simulations are made to demonstrate the effectiveness. The results show that even implementing only one round of iteration in the phase retrieval, an attacker can obtain a clear decoded plaintext (a gray-scale image) from an intercept ciphertext.
We propose an approach to enhance the security of optical encryption based on double-random phase encryption in a 4f system. The phase key in the input plane of the 4f system is generated by the Yang–Gu algorithm to control the phase of the encrypted information in the output plane of the 4f system, until the phase in the output plane converges to a predesigned distribution. Only the amplitude of the encrypted information must be recorded as a ciphertext. The information, which needs to be transmitted, is greatly reduced. We can decrypt the ciphertext with the aid of the predesigned phase distribution and the phase key in the Fourier plane. Our approach can resist various attacks.
In this paper, we analyze the security of the classical double random phase encoding (DRPE) technique in Fourier domain, as well as its extended schemes in Fresnel and fractional Fourier domains. These schemes are resistant to bruteforce attacks, for their large key spaces. However, due to the linearity property of their encryption transformations, they are vulnerable to other attacks, such as chosen-plaintext attack and known-plaintext attack. We successfully break each of the three encryption schemes with the help of a certain quantity of plaintext-ciphertext pairs. Each attack is validated by computer simulations. The cryptanalysis indicates that, to minimize the risks, it is recommendable to introduce nonlinear operations to optical encryption systems.
In conventional symmetric encryption, it is common for the encryption/decryption key to be reused for multiple plaintexts. This gives rise to the concept of a known-plaintext attack. In optical image encryption systems, such as double random phase encoding (DRPE), this is also the case. With optical encryption, if one knows a plaintext-ciphertext pair, one can carry out a known-plaintext attack more efficiently than a bruteforce attack, using heuristics based on phase retrieval or simulated annealing. However, it is more likely that an attacker will find an imperfect encryption/decryption key using such heuristics. Such an imperfect key will work for the known plaintext-ciphertext pair, but not an arbitrary unseen plaintext-ciphertext pair using the original key. In this paper, we illustrate the problem and attempt to characterise the increase in security it affords optical encryption.
This work reports an optical double-image crosstalk free encryption scheme that employs equal modulus decomposition and random masks. For the encryption, two plaintexts by a random amplitude mask and a random phase mask have been encrypted into a single ciphertext mask and two private key masks. Owing to the two random masks introduced, the functional relation between the plaintext pair and the ciphertext indirectly cause the paucity of constraints employed for the specific attack. Unlike the traditional phase-truncation-based techniques, this scheme is immune to the information leakage and different types of attacks. Furthermore, the three different diffraction distances and the illuminating wavelength also function as four additional keys to significantly reinforce the security. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the proposal.