Suggested Rules for Designing Secure Communication Systems Utilizing Chaotic Lasers: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews the state of optical chaotic communication systems based on semiconductor lasers, highlighting the lack of standardized security evaluation rules and proposing criteria and guidelines for designing secure systems.

Contribution

It summarizes security evaluation criteria for optical chaotic communications and proposes rules to enhance the security of systems using chaotic lasers.

Findings

Identified the absence of standardized security evaluation rules.

Summarized criteria for assessing security in optical chaotic communications.

Suggested future research topics in security analysis.

Abstract

Chaotic communications based on semiconductor lasers have aroused great research interest since 1990s. Physical-layer encryption using chaotic lasers is an alternative to transmit message rapidly and confidentially. There are some practical devices and setups for optical chaotic communications, which are intuitively considered to be secure. However, there is lack of a set of security evaluation rules for these communication setups. According to the recent literature, we summarize several criteria for optical chaotic communications to evaluate the security and point out some methods to enhance the security. These criteria and suggested rules are very helpful in designing secure communication systems using chaotic lasers. Finally we propose some possible hot topics on security analysis of optical chaotic communications in future.