Novel optical password security technique based on optical fractal synthesizer

Abstract

A novel optical security technique for safeguarding user passwords based on an optical fractal synthesizer is proposed. A validating experiment has been carried out. In the proposed technique, a user password is protected by being converted to a fractal image. When a user sets up a new password, the password is transformed into a fractal pattern, and the fractal pattern is stored in authority. If the user is online-validated, his or her password is converted to a fractal pattern again to compare with the previous stored fractal pattern. The converting process is called the fractal encoding procedure, which consists of two steps. First, the password is nonlinearly transformed to get the parameters for the optical fractal synthesizer. Then the optical fractal synthesizer is operated to generate the output fractal image. The experimental result proves the validity of our method. The proposed technique bridges the gap between digital security systems and optical security systems and has many advantages, such as high security level, convenience, flexibility, hyper extensibility, etc. This provides an interesting optical security technique for the protection of digital passwords.