TY - JOUR
T1 - Robustness of Optical Steganographic Communication Under Coherent Detection Attack
AU - Huang, Chaoran
AU - Ma, Philip Y.
AU - Shastri, Bhavin J.
AU - Mittal, Prateek
AU - Prucnal, Paul R.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by NSF EARS under Grant 1642962 and in part by the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University.
Funding Information:
Manuscript received December 3, 2018; accepted January 6, 2019. Date of publication January 10, 2019; date of current version February 5, 2019. This work was supported in part by NSF EARS under Grant 1642962 and in part by the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University. (Corresponding author: Chaoran Huang.) The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08542 USA (e-mail: chaoranh@princeton.edu; yechim@princeton.edu; shastri@ieee.org; pmittal@princeton.edu; prucnal@ princeton.edu).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.
PY - 2019/2/15
Y1 - 2019/2/15
N2 - In fiber-optic networks, optical steganographic communication hides the existence of stealth signals in public channels. The previous security analyses assumed threat models in which eavesdroppers rely only on the real-time key search in the optical domain for signal recovery. In this letter, we study a new threat model that uses coherent detection and offline digital signal processing (DSP) to recover the stealth signal, and we show the robustness of optical steganographic communication under this attack. We find that eavesdroppers equipped with the state-of-the-art coherent detectors and DSP technologies fail to estimate the secret key. In addition, even if the eavesdroppers are given the secret key, the stealth signal cannot be recovered from the signal using DSP. The histogram of the received signal after DSP displays a noise-like form which prevents eavesdroppers from detecting the existence of the stealth signal. We attribute the system robustness to the unique features of using amplified spontaneous emission noise as the signal carrier, including wide bandwidth, large phase variance, and fast phase fluctuation.
AB - In fiber-optic networks, optical steganographic communication hides the existence of stealth signals in public channels. The previous security analyses assumed threat models in which eavesdroppers rely only on the real-time key search in the optical domain for signal recovery. In this letter, we study a new threat model that uses coherent detection and offline digital signal processing (DSP) to recover the stealth signal, and we show the robustness of optical steganographic communication under this attack. We find that eavesdroppers equipped with the state-of-the-art coherent detectors and DSP technologies fail to estimate the secret key. In addition, even if the eavesdroppers are given the secret key, the stealth signal cannot be recovered from the signal using DSP. The histogram of the received signal after DSP displays a noise-like form which prevents eavesdroppers from detecting the existence of the stealth signal. We attribute the system robustness to the unique features of using amplified spontaneous emission noise as the signal carrier, including wide bandwidth, large phase variance, and fast phase fluctuation.
KW - Communication system security
KW - digital signal processing
KW - optical fiber communication
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U2 - 10.1109/LPT.2019.2891955
DO - 10.1109/LPT.2019.2891955
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85061334349
SN - 1041-1135
VL - 31
SP - 327
EP - 330
JO - IEEE Photonics Technology Letters
JF - IEEE Photonics Technology Letters
IS - 4
M1 - 8607988
ER -