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Optical Fiber Communication Conference

2.5 Gbps Error-free Physical Layer Key Distribution based on Signal Hiding over 80-km SSMF

Kongni Zhu, Yuang Li, Mingrui Zhang, Yajie Li, Yongli Zhao, Jie Zhang

Published Jan 1, 2024• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We propose a physical layer key distribution scheme based on signal hiding and concatenated coding. Experimental results demonstrate that an error-free key can be obtained with the key generation rate of 2.5 Gbps over the 80-km standard single-mode fiber.
DOI
10.1364/ofc.2024.m4d.4

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A key generation and distribution scheme in coherent optical system is proposed, which is compatible with the current fiber infrastructure. The random key is generated by quantifying system noise which is obtained according to the training sequence. The key signal with the low power is hidden in the 212×212 TQAM signal. The legal party can extract the key signal from 16 QAM signals, but the attacker can only extract the key signal from 212×212 TQAM signals. Compared with processing 212×212 TQAM signals, existing algorithms are more effective at processing 16 QAM signals. It provides the security of key distribution and is verified by experiment. The concatenated coding including LDPC coding and differential coding is employed to get error-free key and expand the security space. Since differential coding leads to cumulative errors, the key error rate is ∼50% when the key error rate is above the LDPC threshold. The proposed scheme achieves an error-free key with KDR of 2.5 Gbps over 80 km SSMF, which does not require the presetting, external random source, and additional device.
High-speed physical-layer secure key generation and distribution (SKGD) schemes via channel reciprocity are achieved using external electro-optical modulation or random source distribution via additional fiber links. Here, we propose and demonstrate an SKGD scheme using the fluctuation of polarization states from an amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) source, without any external electro-optical modulation or additional fiber link. Experimentally, an error-free key generation rate (KGR) of 10.1 Gb/s is achieved over a 10-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF), with true randomness originating from ASE. Moreover, the single fiber channel can be shared for SKGD as well as data transmission, allowing the integration of the proposed SKGD with the deployed fiber infrastructure.
Key distribution is a major challenge of secure communication. Computational approaches to key distribution are breached by quantum algorithms, while quantum key distribution (QKD) is an expensive, slow, and sophisticated solution. Secure key generation and distribution from unpredictable and inherent physical-layer properties of optical fiber channel is a classical, simple and cost-effective solution. However, the quasi-static nature of fiber channels dramatically limits the available key generation rate (KGR) to the order of ~kbit/s. Here we effectively accelerate the KGR by six orders of magnitude using a developed high-speed chaotic polarization scrambler (CPS) driven by digital chaos in fiber channels. An error-free KGR of 284.8 Mbit/s is experimentally demonstrated over a 24 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF), where the generated key passes the random test suite. Moreover, we fully analyze the security mechanism and find that a strong asymmetry exists between legal and illegal users, ensuring a high-level of security against potential fiber-tapping attacks. This scheme provides a major step towards the practical implementation of the “one-time-pad” in secure data transmission over fiber networks.
A physical-layer secure key generation and distribution (SKGD) scheme in classical fiber channel is proposed and demonstrated using a bidirectional wide-band polarization scrambler (WBPS), to alter rapidly and symmetrically the state of polarization (SOP) for the two counter-propagating optical signals in fiber. Due to the optical channel reciprocity, highly-consistent key bits can be extracted from the correlated SOP fluctuations, while the key secrecy is ensured by the fiber channel uniqueness. A final key generation rate (KGR) of 2.7 Gb/s is demonstrated over 10 km single mode fiber (SMF), where error-free and true randomness of the generated key are achieved after post-processing. The obtained KGR at Gb/s makes a further step towards the implementation of one-time-pad data encryption with perfect secrecy in fiber networks.