A scheme that can be applied to encrypt and decrypt the signals in the optical physical layer of the coherent optical communications system is proposed and numerically verified. The results show that the scheme can be designed to cause arbitrary ratio of transmission binary code sequence to be misinterpreted by eavesdroppers.
Based on periodically poled lithium niobate, a scheme for optical signal temporal cloak and encryption in the optical physical layer is proposed and numerically studied, in which the amplitude and phase information of the symbols to be sent are detected and transmitted while that of all other symbols will be hidden from the receiver. Meanwhile, the phase and amplitude of the symbols that are not hidden can be encrypted according to arbitrary encryption rules in the optical physical layer. The simulation results show that there is almost no ripple in the cloak time window, which makes the performance of temporal cloak quite well. The output signals with high Q factor can be obtained when the linewidths of the tunable lasers are <300 kHz. Two simple encryption rules are designed, 43.75% of binary codes will be misinterpreted by eavesdropper if the signal is encrypted with such two rules in the demonstration.
We proposed and numerically studied a traceless encryption approach for physical layer security in coherent optical communications system, the most attractive advantage of which is that it is hard for eavesdroppers to be aware that the transmission signal has been encrypted because the modulation formats of encrypted signal are still the regular ones, i.e. traceless encryption. In the proposed approach, the phase only or the combination of phase and amplitude dimensions can be used for encryption and decryption. Three simple encryption rules are designed and used to investigate the encryption security performance of the scheme, in which the QPSK signal can be encrypted to be as 8PSK, QPSK and 8QAM. The results show that three simple encryption rules can cause 37.5%, 25%, 62.5% of user signal binary codes to be misinterpreted by the eavesdroppers, respectively. When the modulation formats of encrypted signal and user signal are identical, the scheme can not only cover up the real information, but also have a potential application at misleading eavesdroppers. The impacts of the control light peak power at the receiver on the decryption performance are also analysed, the results indicate that the decryption performance of the scheme has a good tolerance to the peak power fluctuation of control light at the receiver.
A novel digital signal processing (DSP)-based scheme for physical layer security in coherent optical communication systems is proposed and numerically investigated. The optical layer signal encryption is accomplished by two dispersive elements and one phase modulator (PM) driven by a DSP-generated encryption key, whilst signal decryption uses similar components but with inverted dispersion values and security keys. A critical aspect of the DSP-based physical layer security is that the security keys, driving the PMs to hide/recover the data signals, must be highly unpredictable and noise-like, thus orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals are employed as they possess these characteristics, they can also be easily generated and cover a suitably wide range of unique keys. Numerical simulations are conducted to determine optimum system parameters for achieving a high level of security, the key parameters requiring optimization are the dispersion of the dispersive elements and the bandwidth of the security keys. Using these determined optimum parameters, in-depth investigations are undertaken of encryption/decryption induced transmission performance penalties, sensitives to various parameter offsets and operation over various transmission distances. To observe any data signal dependencies, various performance metrics are investigated for different combinations of modulation formats (DQPSK and 16QAM) and baud rates (40 Gbaud and 100 Gbaud) for the transmitted data signals. The proposed DSP-based physical layer security scheme is shown to have the potential to achieve, in a low-cost and highly effective manner, a high level of physical layer security with acceptable performance penalties for existing coherent optical communication systems.
Public-key encryption is essential for secure communications, eliminating the need for pre-shared keys. However, traditional schemes such as RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) and elliptic curve cryptography rely on computational complexity, making them increasingly susceptible to advances in computing power and algorithms. Physical-layer encryption, which leverages the intrinsic properties of physical systems, offers a promising alternative with security rooted in physics. Despite progress in this field, public-key encryption at the optical layer remains largely unexplored. Here, we propose a novel optical public-key encryption scheme based on partially coherent light sources. The cryptographic keys are encoded in the incoherent optical transmission matrix of an on-chip Mach-Zehnder interferometer mesh, providing high complexity and resilience to computational attacks. We experimentally demonstrate encrypted image transmission over 40 km of optical fiber with high decryption fidelity and achieve a 10 Gbit/s optical encryption rate using a lithium niobate photonic chip. This represents the first implementation of public-key encryption at the physical optical layer. The approach offers key advantages in security, cost, energy efficiency, and compatibility with commercial optical communication systems. By integrating public-key encryption into photonic hardware, this work opens a new direction for secure and high-speed optical communications in next-generation networks.
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.
In this paper, we propose an optical physical layer encryption method to encrypt the signal of polarization division multiplexing (PDM) coherent optical communication system by introducing an artificially controlled fast rotation of the state of polarization (RSOP) into the signal. Simulations conducted in a 40 Gbps PDM-QPSK system show that the authorized user can successfully decrypt the received signal, while the eavesdroppers cannot derive useful information with bit error rates (BER) at 0.38~0.48, which shows that the method effectively improves the security of the system.