Physical Layer Security Protocol for Poisson Channels for Passive Man-in-the-middle Attack

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel two-way physical layer secrecy protocol for Poisson optical channels that guarantees secure communication regardless of channel conditions, outperforming traditional one-way secrecy methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new two-way secrecy coding protocol for Poisson channels that always ensures security, overcoming limitations of classical one-way secrecy schemes.

Findings

Two-way protocol guarantees security regardless of channel conditions.

Numerical results show significant improvements over one-way schemes.

The protocol has strong practical potential for optical communication security.

Abstract

In this work, we focus on the classical optical channel having Poissonian statistical behavior and propose a novel secrecy coding-based physical layer protocol. Our protocol is different but complementary to both (computationally secure) quantum immune cryptographic protocols and (information theoretically secure) quantum cryptographic protocols. Specifically, our (information theoretical) secrecy coding protocol secures classical digital information bits at photonic level exploiting the random nature of the Poisson channel. It is known that secrecy coding techniques for the Poisson channel based on the classical one-way wiretap channel (introduced by Wyner in 1975) ensure secret communication only if the mutual information to the eavesdropper is smaller than that to the legitimate receiver. In order to overcome such a strong limitation, we introduce a two-way protocol that always ensures secret communication independently of the conditions of legitimate and eavesdropper channels. We prove this claim showing rigorous comparative derivation and analysis of the information theoretical secrecy capacity of the classical one-way and of the proposed two-way protocols. We also show numerical calculations that prove drastic gains and strong practical potential of our proposed two-way protocol to secure information transmission over optical channels.