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Frontiers in Optics

Optical Steganography using Phase Encoding of Coherent States in a Noisy Thermal Channel

R. Jain, Arunkumar Jagannathan, Jonathan L. Habif

Published Jan 1, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate steganography through an optical communication channel by encrypting the information in the phase of the coherent state, where the phase distribution emulates a thermal state, making the communication both secure and secret.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2021.jw7a.114

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Steganography is an alternative to cryptography, where information is protected by secrecy (being disguised as innocent communication or noise) rather than being scrambled. In this work we develop schemes for steganographic communication using Fock and coherent states in optical channels based on disguising the communications as thermal noise, with a fidelity approaching 1. We derive bounds on their efficiency in terms of the communication rate and the required keyrate in the case of an all-powerful eavesdropper and provide explicit methods of encoding and error correction for the noiseless channel case.
Quantum steganography is a powerful method for information security where communications between a sender and receiver are disguised as naturally occurring noise in a channel. A candidate resource state required for implementing quantum steganography is a weak coherent state engineered with modulated phase and amplitude values drawn from probability distributions that result in a mixed state indistinguishable from a thermal state. We experimentally demonstrate construction of this resource state by encoding the phase and amplitude of weak coherent laser states such that a third party monitoring the communications channel, measuring the flow of optical states through the channel, would see an amalgamation of states indistinguishable from thermal noise light such as that from spontaneous emission. Using quantum state tomography, we experimentally reconstructed the density matrices for the artificially engineered thermal states and spontaneous emission from an optical amplifier and verified a mean state fidelityF=0.98F=0.98F=0.98when compared with theoretical thermal states.
Secure optical communications involve securing data transmitted over optical networks, primarily using technologies like optical encryption to protect data in transit. We have developed an optical steganography communication technique based on a quantum dot coherent comb laser, laser channels have strong correlated phase relationship. Each stealth channel uses two comb lines, which operates through two paired Mach-Zehnder interferometers. One line carries data, while the other serves as a reference. At the transmitter, phase modulation adds data to one comb line. An optical delay introduces a mismatch between the two lines to make the data undetectable to others. At the receiver, a programmable tunable delay matches the assigned delays from the different stealth channels. If the tunable delay matches the delay difference between the two-comb lines, the signal is recovered. The system uses physical-layer encryption instead of digital encryption to ensure robust security, scalability, and real-time data protection without computational processing.
In a previous work we have discussed a theoretical grounding for classical steganography using quantum Fock and coherent states in an optical channel, building on previous work by Wu et al. In that work, we discussed protocols which disguise communications to mimic the thermal state of a harmonic oscillator. In this work we will extend this to transmission of quantum information, and demonstrate the utility of steganographic entanglement sharing in practical contexts like nonclassical state teleportation, even with the presence of an active eavesdropper.