Chaotic physical layer encryption scheme based on phase ambiguity for a DMT system

• Main Authors: Gao, R. (Author), Li, Z. (Author), Pan, X. (Author), Tian, F. (Author), Tian, Q. (Author), Wang, X. (Author), Wang, Y. (Author), Xin, X. (Author), Yao, H. (Author), Zhang, Q. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA) 2022
• Subjects: article; Artificial noise; Blind equalization; Chaotic equations; Chaotics; conjugate; Cryptography; Discrete multi tone systems; encryption; Encryption schemes; Network layers; noise; Optical communication; Phase ambiguity; Physical layers; Probabilistics; Quadrature amplitude modulation; rotation; Shaping techniques; Shifting scheme; simulation
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 Chaotic encryption is a promising scheme for physical layer security. By solving the multi-dimensional chaotic equations and transforming the obtained results, both bit-level and symbol-level encryption can be realized. One of the mainstream symbol-level encryption solutions is the constellation shifting (CS) scheme, which treats the chaotic sequence as artificial noise and adds it to the QAM signal sequence to achieve encryption. However, this scheme has several technical flaws in practical application, in terms of computational complexity and coexistence with blind equalization algorithm and the probabilistic shaping (PS) technique. In this paper, we propose a novel symbol-level encryption scheme based on phase ambiguity (PA), which converts the two sequences originally used to generate artificial noise into a set of phase rotation keys and complex conjugate keys, so that the encrypted symbols are still on the ideal constellation point coordinates. Simulation verification is carried out in a discrete multi-tone (DMT) system with 64QAM modulation. Results show that the proposed scheme can fully retain the shaping gain brought by the PS technique and avoid the error convergence of the blind equalizer. Moreover, the time required to solve the chaotic equations is only 38% of the CS scheme. Experimental verification is carried out, and the obtained results once again prove the superiority of the proposed encryption algorithm, which is a practical alternative for future physical layer secure optical communications. © 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement.