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Optical Fiber Communication Conference

Secure Free-Space Optical Communication via Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE)

Hanzi Huang, Jian Chen, Haoshuo Chen, Yetian Huang, Yingchun Li, Yingxiong Song, Nicolas K. Fontaine, Roland R. Ryf, Min Wang

Published Jan 1, 2020• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a secure free-space optical (FSO) communication scheme employing the internal randomness of amplified spontaneous emission. 60-Gbit/s FSO transmission is demonstrated with temporal and spectral encryption.
DOI
10.1364/ofc.2020.th1k.3

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We propose and experimentally demonstrate a stable secure optical communication system with no need for secure key distribution. In this scheme, the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise is used as the optical carrier to hide the signal both in time and frequency domain. The coherence length of the ASE noise is pretty short so that it is extremely difficult for an eavesdropper to intercept the signal. Only one Mach-Zehnder interferometer exists in the receiver, and there is no need for the receiver to match the optical delay. By this way, the optical delay and the polarization fluctuation caused by the environment can be automatically counteracted in the returning path. Therefore, no key distribution is required, and the optical delay value can be changed dynamically as a secret key in the receiver. In our experiment, 1Gb/s encrypted on-off keying signal is securely transmitted over 25km standard single mode fiber and dispersion compensation fiber.
Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) light is a common noise in optical communication systems with optical amplification, and a suitable optical carrier for optical covert communication. To deeply covert the secure signal, an in-band subnoise optical covert communication scheme is proposed and demonstrated by a proof-of-concept experiment. The power spectral density of optical secure channel is 10 dB less than the optical noise in the public channel. The covert signal is hidden in both optical and electrical domain, and can be transmitted with error-free. The trade-off between covertness and availability is discussed.
Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) light is the most natural optical carrier to hide a message in the existing optical networks at photonic layer. To enhance the anti-intercept ability of the ASE-carried stealth channel, a novel optical stealth communication scheme based on quantum noise stream cipher is proposed. The ASE light is intensity modulated by the cipher-text according to Y-00 protocol, and then transmitted under public optical noise after power attenuation. The expression of quantum noise stream ciphered ASE signal is derived, and numerical simulation is carried out. A proof-of-concept experiment is set up to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme. The experiment results show that the quantum noise stream ciphered stealth signals can be transmitted over a 25 km single-mode fiber span error-free.