Hardware fingerprint construction of optical transmitters based on permutation entropy spectrum of chaos for secure authentication

Abstract

In this paper, an optical transmitter authentication method using hardware fingerprints based on the permutation entropy spectrum (PES) of electro-optic chaos is proposed. By means of permutation analysis of chaotic time series generated by the electro-optic feedback loop, PES is defined and used as the hardware fingerprint of optical transmitters for secure authentication. The time division multiplexing (TDM) module is used to combine the chaotic signal and the message, while the optical temporal encryption (OTE) module is introduced to ensure the security of the fingerprint. At the receiver, the time division demultiplexing (TDD) module and the optical time decryption (TDD) module are introduced to recover the original chaotic signal. The trained support vector machine (SVM) models will then recognize legal and illegal optical transmitters by judging whether the PES of the received chaotic signal is legitimate or not. The simulation and experimental results show that PES of electro-optic chaos has obvious fingerprint characteristics and is sensitive to the feedback delay T in the feedback loop. The authentication system based on PES can recognize both legal and illegal transmitters in optical networks, and the recognition accuracy can reach about 97%. Under the condition of a low signal-to-noise ratio, the authentication system based on the permutation entropy spectrum can still distinguish legal and illegal transmitters effectively. Meanwhile, our scheme has high controllability and flexibility.