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IEEE Photonics Technology Letters

214Intensity-Level 10-Gbaud Y-00 Quantum Stream Cipher Enabled by Coarse-to-Fine Modulation

Ken Tanizawa, Fumio Futami

Published Oct 8, 2018• 20 citations
Publisher

Abstract

For secure fiber-optic transmission, we demonstrate a 10-Gbaud Y-00 quantum stream cipher that achieves quantum noise masking using 214(=16,384) intensity-level modulation. Coarse-to-fine driving of a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator using two synchronized digital-to-analog converters is employed for the modulation. Successful off-line decryption of the cipher is achieved.

DOI
10.1109/lpt.2018.2874236

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For secure fiber-optic transmission, we demonstrate a 10-Gbaud Y-00 quantum stream cipher that achieves quantum noise masking using 214(=16,384) intensity-level modulation. Coarse-to-fine driving of a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator using two synchronized digital-to-analog converters is employed for the modulation. Successful off-line decryption of the cipher is achieved.
We present a symmetric-key direct data encryption technique utilizing signal masking by quantum noise, called Y-00 quantum stream cipher. Physical encryption of phase-shift-keying (PSK) Y-00 quantum stream cipher is achieved by our proposed extremely high-order phase modulation. Two cascaded phase modulators are driven with two synchronized digital-to-analog converters for coarse-to-fine modulations, resulting in a record 217 phase levels for the quantum noise masking. Decryption of the cipher is implemented in digital signal processing after intra-dyne coherent detection with a free-running local oscillator. We experimentally demonstrate transmission of 10-Gbaud digital-coherent PSK Y-00 cipher with 217 levels over a 240-km field-installed single-mode fiber.
The Internet plays an essential role in modern societies and in the amount of sensitive data transported over the optical networks that shows its' importance has increased drastically. Therefore, it is critical to develop data protection schemes for optical fiber communications to provide user security. The Y-00 quantum-noise randomized stream cipher that employs extremely high-order modulation and restricts an attacker's interception of ciphertext is a practical candidate for providing data protection. In this article, we introduce the operation principle of the Y-00 cipher with respect to data encryption and decryption. The Y-00 cipher combines the mathematical encryption of multi-level signaling and physical randomness, and provides a high level of security to the physical layer of optical communications and a high communication performance. We also present the noise masking phenomenon of the Y-00 cipher with intensity modulation (IM). This noise masking is generated by shot noise, i.e., quantum noise and additive noise such as amplified spontaneous emission noise. The noise masking phenomenon fails an attacker's interception of the ciphertext. The secrecy of the IM Y-00 cipher is also discussed, and an approximate analytical solution is introduced for evaluating the probability of the attackers accurately guessing the ciphertext. Finally, the secrecy of a 1,000-km transmission system is experimentally demonstrated with the Y-00 cipher transceiver at data rate of 1.5-Gb/s using the derived analytical solution to deduce the high secrecy of the entire transmission system.
In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a secure 100 Gb/s 214-level intensity modulation and direct detection transmission over a 50 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) using a quantum noise stream cipher (QNSC) technique and 8-bit digital to analog converters. Optical coarse-to-fine modulation (CTFM) has been proposed to simultaneously enhance the security and overcome the weakness of low modulation depth in the traditional CTFM scheme. The optical power instead of the radio-frequency signal power is adjusted to satisfy the required peak-to-peak relation for CTFM, and thus the coarse and fine modulation has the same modulation depth. Two optical CTFM schemes based on an optical coupler and a polarizing beam combiner (PBC) are proposed and their pros and cons are analyzed and compared. Considering the trade-off of transmission performance and security performance, the optical CTFM scheme based on PBC is preferred in our experiment. 214-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) is achieved using two dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulators (DD-MZM). Simultaneously, each DD-MZM is also used to achieve single-sideband (SSB) modulation to eliminate the power fading induced by fiber dispersion. By these means, 100 Gb/s 214-level PAM-QNSC signal transmission over 50 km SSMF with the bit error rate below the 7% overhead hard-decision forward error correction threshold of 3.8×10−3 is achieved. The results validate that the proposed scheme is effective to realize low-cost, high-speed, and highly secure optical transmission in the data center.