Asymmetrical and Biometric Encrypted Optical Scanning Holography (ABE-OSH)

Abstract

In this article, we report an optical scanning holography (OSH) system that is equipped with biometric and the asymmetrical Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) encryption. Past research works have demonstrated that either encryption alone is vulnerable to certain types of attacks if both the encrypted and source data are available. Essentially, given sufficient time and computation power, it is possible to deduce the encryption key from these two datasets. Our proposed method can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, biometric encryption is incorporated in the OSH system to convert the image of a physical object into a biometric encrypted hologram. In the second stage, the biometric encrypted hologram is encoded with differential pulse code modulation (DPCM), and the polarity of the DPCM data is encrypted with the RSA algorithm. Due to the cascade of these two stages, it is not possible to identify both the source and encrypted data in each stage, and use them to hack the decryption key. We have demonstrated fast capturing and encryption of physical objects with our proposed method, and shown that that when either the biometric or the RSA encryption key is missing, the hologram cannot be recovered and the reconstructed image is incomprehensible. While we have demonstrated our idea with OSH, the proposed technique is applicable to any digital holographic systems.