Optical encryption with protection against Dirac delta and plain signal attacks.

Abstract

This Letter proposes an optical encryption technique that disguises the information with modular arithmetic concepts and time-varying noise components that are unknown to the receiver. Optical encryption systems that use these techniques produce a nondeterministic system response, as well as noise like image data that can easily be generated with ordinary spatial light modulators. The principle of this technique is demonstrated for the double random phase encoding (DRPE) method. The conventional DRPE method has major vulnerabilities for Dirac signal and plain signal attacks, making them impractical for secure encryption. It is shown that the proposed encryption technique provides a robustness against these types of attacks, allowing optical DRPE to be employed in secure encryptions. Moreover, applications of this Letter are not limited to DRPE alone but can also be adopted by other optical encryption techniques such as fractional Fourier transform and Fresnel-transform-based techniques.