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Photonics Research

High-speed optical secure communication with an external noise source and an internal time-delayed feedback loop

Yudi Fu, Mengfan Cheng, Xingxing Jiang, Quan Yu, Linbojie Huang, Lei Deng, Deming Liu

Published Oct 31, 2019• 63 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel physical layer encryption scheme for high-speed optical communication. A 10 Gb/s on-off keying signal is secretly transmitted over 100 km standard single-mode fiber. The intensity-modulated message is secured by the encryption mechanism, which is composed of an external noise source and an internal time-delayed feedback loop. The external noise serves as an entropy source with sufficient randomness. The feedback loop structure in the transmitter introduces a time-domain encryption key space, and a corresponding open-loop configuration at the receiver side is used for synchronization and decryption. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. For a legitimate terminal, bit error rate below 10−8 can be obtained. Decryption degradations with the mismatch of different hardware parameters are researched. The time delay in the feedback loop provides a sensitive encryption key. For other hardware parameters, the system is robust enough for synchronization. Meanwhile, the time-delay signature of the loop is able to be well concealed by the external noise. Moreover, the proposed scheme can support density wavelength division multiplexing transmission with a relatively simple structure. This work also provides a new concept to establish optical secure communication by combining a time-delayed feedback chaotic system and random noise.

DOI
10.1364/prj.7.001306

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We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel physical layer encryption scheme for high-speed optical communication. A 10 Gb/s on-off keying signal is secretly transmitted over 100 km standard single-mode fiber. The intensity-modulated message is secured by the encryption mechanism, which is composed of an external noise source and an internal time-delayed feedback loop. The external noise serves as an entropy source with sufficient randomness. The feedback loop structure in the transmitter introduces a time-domain encryption key space, and a corresponding open-loop configuration at the receiver side is used for synchronization and decryption. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. For a legitimate terminal, bit error rate below 10−8 can be obtained. Decryption degradations with the mismatch of different hardware parameters are researched. The time delay in the feedback loop provides a sensitive encryption key. For other hardware parameters, the system is robust enough for synchronization. Meanwhile, the time-delay signature of the loop is able to be well concealed by the external noise. Moreover, the proposed scheme can support density wavelength division multiplexing transmission with a relatively simple structure. This work also provides a new concept to establish optical secure communication by combining a time-delayed feedback chaotic system and random noise.
We report on a 10Gb/s secret transmission of an intensity-modulated message over 100km standard single mode fiber. The intensity-modulated message is encrypted with a phase-modulated random noise. Without decryption, the transmission signal appears to be noise-like and cannot be recovered with post-processing method. With decryption, bit error rate below 10-8is obtained. Decryption degradations with the mismatch of different hardware parameters are researched, This scheme provides a large key space with delay time the sensitive secret key and a robust decryption with the robustness of other hardware parameters.
Abstract We propose and numerically demonstrate a novel high-speed physical layer secure optical communication system based on a dual-path mutual feedback phase encryption scheme, which comprises two coupled electro-optic phase modulation feedback branches. The proposed scheme is able to randomly scramble the phase of a confidential message without any additional encryption signal and eliminate the time delay signature (TDS) that exists in a conventional electro-optic phase feedback loop. The TDS concealment is accomplished by the nonlinear transformation produced by the dual-path mutual feedback optical phase encryptor. As a proof-of-principle demonstration, a 32 Gbps differential phase shift keying signal is encrypted and secretly transmitted over a span of 330 km standard single-mode fiber with a bit error rate lower than the hard-decision forward-error correction threshold. Both the sensitive delay time and dispersion values in the feedback loop are employed as hardware keys to guarantee system security. It is envisioned that the proposed scheme may provide an attractive approach for future hardware encryption based high-speed secure optical communication.
Abstract In this paper, a novel secure communication scheme based on temporal spreading and dual-phase perturbation is proposed to improve security at the physical layer. For one thing, the traditional electro-optical feedback phase encryption system is significantly sophisticated by the introduction of additional synchronized chaotic phase encryption. Besides, more keys in this system are available, with the attendance of dispersion and optical chaos, the key space is notably enhanced to ∼2 36 , resisting the eavesdropping attacks. After passing through a series of encryption devices, the information is ultimately displayed as a noise-like signal. A 32 Gb s −1 on-off keying signal is successfully transmitted over a 100 km standard single-mode fiber. Simulation results show that by selecting the appropriate system parameters, a bit error rate as low as 10 −10 can be obtained for legitimate terminals, and the effect of different hardware parameter mismatches on the decryption performance is also investigated which indicates a certain tolerance range for the mismatch of each parameter. This paper provides a new idea to combine an electro-optical feedback system with optical chaos to establish optical secrecy communication.
Protecting the security of optical network is a major worldwide challenge. The conventional schemes for securing communications are based on cryptography at the MAC layer and its higher layers, which are facing a great threat with the development of quantum computers. Optical encryption is a promising way for building security on the physical layer of optical communications. In this work, we propose a novel optical encryption scheme for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) fiber-optic communication systems, by utilizing the private chaotic phase scrambling. Secure transmission of 50 Gbps signal over 50-km standard single-mode fiber is experimentally and numerically demonstrated. The results show that the WDM signal is efficiently encrypted into a noise-like signal, due to the spectral broadening effect of chaotic phase scrambling. Since the processes of encryption and decryption are totally implemented in the optical domain, the proposed scheme can encrypt the entire network traffic with low latency and high speed. Moreover, the proposed encryption scheme is compatible with the existing WDM optical networks, and only one pair of encryption and decryption devices is sufficient to encrypt all WDM channels, thus the scheme can be easily implemented at low hardware cost.
High speed physical secure key distribution in a classical optical fiber channel is unprecedentedly desired for modern secure communication, but it still remains a worldwide technical challenge. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel high-speed physical secure key distribution scheme based on chaotic optical signal processing and private hardware modules, which employs chaotic self-carrier phase modulation for chaotic bandwidth expansion and time-delayed shift keying of commonly driven synchronized optical chaos for physical layer security. In this scheme, the entropy source rate of synchronized chaos output from two remote response lasers is greatly expanded by chaotic self-carrier delayed nonlinear phase disturbance, which facilitates high speed key extraction from the entropy source with guaranteed randomness. Moreover, a synchronization recovery time of sub-nanosecond is achieved by dynamic keying of the chaotic delay time after chaos synchronization to accelerate the key distribution rate. Based on the proposed scheme, a high physical key distribution rate of 2.1 Gb/s over 40 km is successfully demonstrated in the experiment. The proposed solution provides a promising strategy for future high-speed key distribution based on chaotic optical signal processing and classical fiber channel.
In conventional optical communication systems, the transmission signals are regular digital signals. Due to the openness of optical fiber networks, it is rather easy for eavesdroppers to obtain the transmission signals from the public fiber-link and then intercept the message directly. To address this crucial security challenge, in this work we propose a high-speed secure optical communication system in virtue of physical random temporal encryption based on private physical random phase modulation and phase-to-intensity conversion. The proposed physical random temporal encryption is performed by a module composed of a phase modulator (PM) and a chirped fiber Bragg grating (CFBG), and the corresponding decryption is achieved with a similar module composed of an inverse-phase driven PM and an oppositedispersion CFBG. By distributing a constant-amplitude random-phase signal to the local semiconductor lasers deployed in the encryption module and decryption module, a pair of synchronized physical random PM driving signals that are not exchanged on public link can be independently generated, which guarantees the receiver end can correctly decrypt the original transmission message. Our numerical results demonstrate that with the proposed encryption scheme, the regular transmission signal is encrypted as a noise-like signal that can greatly enhance the security of message, and moreover, based on the private synchronized physical random phase modulation, the privacy of encryption and decryption are guaranteed, which prevents the eavesdroppers from intercepting transmission message. This work provides a promising strategy for the implement of high-speed high-security physical-layer optical communication.