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Journal of Lightwave Technology

Ultrafast Fully Photonic Random Bit Generator

Pu Li, Anbang Wang, Ya Guo, Yanqiang Guo, Yuanlong Fan, Xiaomin Guo, Xianglian Liu, Kun-Ying Li, K. Alan Shore, Yuncai Wang

Published Mar 20, 2018• 57 citations
Publisher

Abstract

To achieve complete security of communication, there is a need for “real-time” ultrafast physical random bit generators (RBGs). In the available physical RBGs, random bit extraction is effected in the electrical domain and, therefore, cannot directly function beyond the frequencies of 10 GHz or so in real time. Here, we present a fully photonic strategy for real-time random number generation and report a proof-of-concept experimental demonstration of an integrated 10 Gb/s RBG system (prototype) based on laser chaos. The use of an ultrastable mode-locked laser, together with ultrafast optical interactions, gives our method the capability to develop super-high-speed RBGs in practice. The photonic implementation is fully compatible with optical communications so that well-established optical multiplexing techniques can be used to realize Tb/s real-time random bit generation.

DOI
10.1109/jlt.2018.2817512

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To achieve complete security of communication, there is a need for “real-time” ultrafast physical random bit generators (RBGs). In the available physical RBGs, random bit extraction is effected in the electrical domain and, therefore, cannot directly function beyond the frequencies of 10 GHz or so in real time. Here, we present a fully photonic strategy for real-time random number generation and report a proof-of-concept experimental demonstration of an integrated 10 Gb/s RBG system (prototype) based on laser chaos. The use of an ultrastable mode-locked laser, together with ultrafast optical interactions, gives our method the capability to develop super-high-speed RBGs in practice. The photonic implementation is fully compatible with optical communications so that well-established optical multiplexing techniques can be used to realize Tb/s real-time random bit generation.
Real-time and ultrafast random number generators (RNGs) based on physical randomness sources are of paramount importance for cryptography and secure communications, where they are used as cryptographic keys to protect the privacy of data transmission. Since 2008, laser chaos has been viewed as the most promising source of randomness for fast RNGs because of its high bandwidth and large fluctuation. However, most of physical RNGs based on laser chaos did their random number extraction in the electrical domain, and thus their real-time rates suffered from the limitation of electronic bottleneck. Combing the chaotic laser with photonic signal processing techniques, we proposed and developed an innovative real-time methodology for ultrafast physical RNGs. Different with previous reports on RNGs, our fully photonic method do the random number extraction in the optical domain, so it efficiently circumvents the electronic bottleneck and has the potential to reach a real-time rate at the level of Tb/s. In this paper, we review our representative works on this topic of fully photonics based physical RNGs and some possible development orientations in the future are discussed.
Random numbers have great application value in the fields of secure communications, which are commonly used as secret keys to encrypt the information. To guarantee that the information is absolutely secure in the current high-speed communication, the applied random keys should possess a generation speed not less than the encrypted data rate, according to one-time pad theory found by Shannon (Shannon C E 1949 Bell.Syst.Tech.J. 28 656) Pseudo-random numbers generated by algorithm may easily reach a fast speed, but a certain periodicity makes them difficult to meet the aforementioned demand of information security. Utilizing physical stochastic phenomena can provide reliable random numbers, called physical random number generators (RNGs). However, limited by the bandwidth of the conventional physical sources such as electronic noise, frequency jitter of oscillator and quantum randomness, the traditional physical RNG has a generation speed at a level of Mb/s typically. Therefore, real-time and ultrafast physical random number generation is urgently required from the view of absolute security for high-speed communication today. With the advent of wideband photonic entropy sources, in recent years lots of schemes for high-speed random number generation are proposed. Among them, chaotic laser has received great attention due to its ultra-wide bandwidth and large random fluctuation of intensity. The real-time speed of physical RNG based on chaotic laser is now limited under 5 Gb/s, although the reported RNG claims that an ultrafast speed of Tb/s is possible in theory. The main issues that restrict the real-time speed of RNG based on chaotic laser are from two aspects. The first aspect is electrical jitter bottleneck confronted by the electrical analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Specifically, most of the methods of extracting random numbers are first to convert the chaotic laser into an electrical signal by a photo-detector, then use an electrical ADC driven by radio frequency (RF) clock to sample and quantify the chaotic signal in electronic domain. Unfortunately, the response rate of ADC is below Gb/s restricted by the aperture jitter (several picoseconds) of RF clock in the sample and hold circuit. The second aspect comes from the complex post-processes, which are fundamental in current RNG techniques to realize a good randomness. The strict synchronization among post-processing components (e.g., XOR gates, memory buffers, high-order difference) is controlled by an RF clock. Similarly, it is also an insurmountable obstacle to achieve an accurate synchronization due to the electronic jitter of the RF clock. In this paper, we propose a method of ultrafast multi-bit physical RNG based on chaotic laser without any post-process. In this method, a train of optical pulses generated by a GHz mode-locked laser with low temporal jitter at a level of fs is used as an optical sampling clock. The chaotic laser is sampled in the optical domain through a low switching energy and high-linearity terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexer (TOAD) sampler, which is a fiber loop with an asymmetrical nonlinear semiconductor optical amplifier. Then, the peak amplitude of each sampled chaotic pulse is digitized by a multi-bit comparator (i.e., a multi-bit ADC without sample and hold circuit) and converted into random numbers directly. Specifically, a proof-of-principle experiment is executed to demonstrate the aforementioned proposed method. In this experiment, an optical feedback chaotic laser is used, which has a bandwidth of 6 GHz. Through setting a sampling rate to be 5 GSa/s and selecting 4 LSBs outputs of the 8-bit comparator, 20 Gb/s (=5 GSa/s4 LSBs) physical random number sequences are obtained. Considering the ultrafast response rate of TOAD sampler, the speed of random numbers generated by this method has the potential to reach several hundreds of Gb/s as long as the used chaotic laser has a sufficient bandwidth.
We present a real-time scheme for ultrafast random number (RN) extraction from a broadband photonic entropy source. Ultralow jitter mode-locked pulses are used to sample the stochastic intensity fluctuations of the entropy source in the optical domain. A discrete self-delay comparison technology is exploited to quantize the sampled pulses into continuous RN streams directly. This scheme is bias free, eliminates the electronic jitter bottleneck confronted by currently available physical RN generators, and has no need for threshold tuning and post-processing. To demonstrate its feasibility, we perform a proof-of-principle experiment using an optically injected chaotic laser diode. RN streams at up to 7 Gb/s with verified randomness were thereby successfully extracted in real time. With the provision of a photonic entropy source with sufficient bandwidth, the present approach is expected to provide RN generation rates of several tens of gigabits per second.
We propose a real-time self-balanced photonic method for extracting ultrafast random numbers from broadband randomness sources. In place of electronic analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), the balanced photo-detection technology is used to directly quantize optically sampled chaotic pulses into a continuous random number stream. Benefitting from ultrafast photo-detection, our method can efficiently eliminate the generation rate bottleneck from electronic ADCs which are required in nearly all the available fast physical random number generators. A proof-of-principle experiment demonstrates that using our approach 10 Gb/s real-time and statistically unbiased random numbers are successfully extracted from a bandwidth-enhanced chaotic source. The generation rate achieved experimentally here is being limited by the bandwidth of the chaotic source. The method described has the potential to attain a real-time rate of 100 Gb/s.
The exponential growth of data transmission and processing speeds in modern digital infrastructure requires entropy sources capable of producing large volumes of true randomness for information security. Chaotic emissions from semiconductor lasers are attractive in this context because of their fast dynamics and nonrepetitive behavior. Their spectral bandwidth, however, is typically limited to several tens of gigahertz, which constrains the achievable entropy rate and makes ultrafast random bit generation difficult without substantial post-processing. Here, we demonstrate a chaos-based entropy source that employs optical heterodyning between the chaotic emission from a semiconductor laser and an optical frequency comb, yielding a bandwidth exceeding 100 GHz and an experimentally verified single-channel entropy rate of 1.86 Tb/s. By directly extracting multiple bits from the digitized output of the entropy source, we achieve a single-channel random bit generation rate of 1.536 Tb/s, while four-channel parallelization reaches 6.144 Tb/s with no observable interchannel correlation. This linear scalability suggests that aggregate throughput could reach hundreds of terabits per second with additional parallel channels. The broadband, low-overhead photonic architecture presented here provides a viable route to real-time, ultrafast random bit generation with broad implications for secure communications, high-performance AI computing, and large-scale data analytics.