We demonstrate secure fiber-optic transmission utilizing quantum-noise signal masking by 217-level random phase modulation. Masking of 157 signal phase levels at a BER of HD-FEC threshold is achieved without significant impacts on the transmission performance.
A record-long 10,118-km fiber transmission with physical layer encryption is demonstrated utilizing a Y-00 cipher based on signal masking by quantum (shot) noise. The Y-00 cipher enables symmetric-key data encryption to ensure the security of the physical layer of optical communications. Irreducible secrecy without significant negative impact on transmission performance is achieved by the synergistic effect of combining seed-key-based high-order modulation and truly random shot noise inevitable in optical detection. This paper reports a comprehensive study of applying a phase-shift-keying (PSK) Y-00 cipher for ultra-long haul fiber transmission. Theoretical analysis shows that security-enhanced transmission over transoceanic-distance (>10,000 km) fiber is feasible when the quadrature PSK data signal is encrypted by converting to a PSK signal with 218 levels. Subsequently, 10,118-km standard single-mode fiber transmission of 48-Gbit/s line-rate dual-polarization PSK Y-00 cipher with 218 levels is experimentally demonstrated. An adequate signal quality above the Q-factor threshold of soft decision forward error correction is achieved together with sufficient signal masking by shot noise, yielding balanced transmission performance and high security in an ultra-long-haul PSK Y-00 cipher transmission system.
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.
A probabilistic shaping (PS) quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) based on Y-00 quantum noise stream cipher (QNSC) has been proposed. We experimentally demonstrated this scheme with data rate of 201.6Gbit/s over a 1200-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) under a 20% SD-FEC threshold. Accounting for the 20% FEC and 6.25% pilot overhead, the achieved net data rate is ∼160Gbit/s. In the proposed scheme, a mathematical cipher (Y-00 protocol) is utilized to convert the original low-order modulation PS-16 (2 2 × 2 2 ) QAM into ultra-dense high-order modulation PS-65536 (2 8 × 2 8 ) QAM. Then, the physical randomness of quantum (shot) noise at photodetection and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise from optical amplifiers are employed to mask the encrypted ultra-dense high-order signal for further improving the security. We further analyze the security performance by two metrics known in the reported QNSC systems, namely the number of masked signals (NMS) of noise and the detection failure probability (DFP). Experimental results show it is difficult or even impossible to extract transmission signals from quantum or ASE noise for an eavesdropper (Eve). We believe that the proposed PS-QAM/QNSC secure transmission scheme has the potential to be compatible with existing high-speed long-distance optical fiber communication systems.