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Opto-Electronic Advances

Multi-dimensional multiplexing optical secret sharing framework with cascaded liquid crystal holograms

Keyao Li, Yiming Wang, Dapu Pi, Baoli Li, Haitao Luan, Xinyuan Fang, Peng Chen, Yanqing Lu, Miṅ Gu

Published Jan 1, 2024• 62 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Secret sharing is a promising technology for information encryption by splitting the secret information into different shares. However, the traditional scheme suffers from information leakage in decryption process since the amount of available information channels is limited. Herein, we propose and demonstrate an optical secret sharing framework based on the multi-dimensional multiplexing liquid crystal (LC) holograms. The LC holograms are used as spatially separated shares to carry secret images. The polarization of the incident light and the distance between different shares are served as secret keys, which can significantly improve the information security and capacity. Besides, the decryption condition is also restricted by the applied external voltage due to the variant diffraction efficiency, which further increases the information security. In implementation, an artificial neural network (ANN) model is developed to carefully design the phase distribution of each LC hologram. With the advantage of high security, high capacity and simple configuration, our optical secret sharing framework has great potentials in optical encryption and dynamic holographic display.

DOI
10.29026/oea.2024.230121

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Secret sharing is a promising technology for information encryption by splitting the secret information into different shares. However, the traditional scheme suffers from information leakage in decryption process since the amount of available information channels is limited. Herein, we propose and demonstrate an optical secret sharing framework based on the multi-dimensional multiplexing liquid crystal (LC) holograms. The LC holograms are used as spatially separated shares to carry secret images. The polarization of the incident light and the distance between different shares are served as secret keys, which can significantly improve the information security and capacity. Besides, the decryption condition is also restricted by the applied external voltage due to the variant diffraction efficiency, which further increases the information security. In implementation, an artificial neural network (ANN) model is developed to carefully design the phase distribution of each LC hologram. With the advantage of high security, high capacity and simple configuration, our optical secret sharing framework has great potentials in optical encryption and dynamic holographic display.
The hologram, which is formed by phases coupled through cascade devices for secret information sharing, still carries a cracking risk.We propose a liquid crystal planar doublet as the information carrier, and new holograms generated by the new coupled phases when the relative displacements of the different liquid crystal layers change.The designed geometrical phases are generated by an optimized iterative restoration algorithm, and each holographic image formed by these phases is readable.This scheme achieves an increase in the capacity of the stored secret information and provides more misdirection, which is expected to have potential value in optical steganography and storage.
Abstract Recent progress in multidimensional multiplexing offers promising paths for next‐generation optical encryption. However, challenges remain in integration, dimensional expansion, and dynamic tunability. Here, a highly integrated optical encryption strategy is proposed that achieves 8‐channel multiplexing by combining polarization, wavelength, and spatial position within a single liquid crystal (LC) element, greatly increasing information capacity in a compact format. A multi‐layered nested encryption scheme is constructed, where plaintext is first encoded into a password‐protected quick response (QR) code. Decryption involves extracting far‐field holographic keys via wavelength and position, followed by Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) decryption and 26‐base preprocessing, and finally combining with polarization‐decoded data to retrieve the QR password and recover the plaintext. This hybrid scheme merges physical multiplexing with algorithmic decryption, enhancing both complexity and security. Additionally, the electro‐optical tunability of LCs adds an extra layer of security by allowing on‐demand encryption modulation. The proposed element demonstrates multifunctionality, high integration, and structural simplicity, showing strong potential for secure and scalable applications in optical encryption.
Multi-channel information encryption technology has been implemented by metasurfaces owing to their superior capability in manipulating phase, amplitude, wavelength and polarization of incident light. However, any non-full-channel decoding may lead to the leakage of secret information. To further improve the security of information, in this paper, we propose a channel shared information encoding scheme by integrating visual secret sharing scheme with metasurface-based phase-encoding technique. The secret information can be reconstructed only by decoding all the wavelength channels of the metasurface, whiles meaningless images would be extracted in other channel decoding processes, without revealing any original information. The simulated results show the feasibility and adjustability of our encryption system, which can be potentially applied in future optical information security systems.
Towards growing challenges of information security and authentication, various optical techniques based on holography, diffraction, interference, metasurfaces, etc., deliver promising solutions with low energy consumption and parallel high-speed information processing. Here, we report on a new dimension–second-order coherence found in the well-known Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect–for performing optical authentication and secret sharing. We develop a method to generate a pair of correlated phase-only masks, each of which is distributed to a shareholder and can produce a specific pattern as authentication under coherent illumination, while two secret images are encrypted in the mutual information of two masks. By combining two masks in two configurations, two secret images can be extracted through spatially cascaded display under coherent illumination and intensity correlation under incoherent illumination, respectively. Conspicuously, two extremes of coherence–spatially coherent or incoherent–will enable the encoding and decoding of two different images with the same phase masks, indicating that the first-order and second-order coherence can be two independent channels for optical cryptography just like other degrees of freedom of light (e.g., polarization). Moreover, we demonstrate a polarization-multiplexing scheme to achieve polarization-selective HBT-type optically secret-sharing with increased capacity, and this type of polarization-phase masks can be readily replaced with metasurfaces.
Secret sharing allows three or more parties to share secret information which can only be decrypted through collaboration. It complements quantum key distribution as a valuable resource for securely distributing information. Here we take advantage of hybrid spin and orbital angular momentum states to access a high dimensional encoding space, demonstrating a protocol that is easily scalable in both dimension and participants. To illustrate the versatility of our approach, we first demonstrate the protocol in two dimensions and then extend it to three dimensions. We reconstruct secrets depicted as images with a fidelity of up to 0.979 and 0.946. Moreover, our scheme exploits the use of conventional linear optics to emulate the quantum gates needed for transitions between basis modes on a high dimensional Hilbert space while offering the potential of up to 1.225 bits of encoding capacity per transmitted photon (exceeding the Shannon limit). Our work offers a practical approach for sharing information across multiple parties, a crucial element of any quantum network.