Cryptographic key distribution over a public network via variance-based watermarking in compressive measurements

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThe optical communication has an increasing need for security in public transmission scenarios. Here we present a protocol for cryptographic key distribution over a public network via photon-counting compressive imaging system with watermarking, which utilizes watermarking technique to distribute secure keys, and uses reconstructed images for simultaneous identity authentication and tampering identification. The watermark is embedded in the rearranged compressed measurements of the object, and then the signal is transmitted through a public network. At the receiving terminal, the legitimate users can easily extract the watermark as the cryptographic key by using initial keys and the variance characteristic of random measurements. Artificial tampering and attacks can be detected by the accurately retrieved images. The realization of this protocol is a step forward toward the practical applications, and will be beneficial for the broader fields of optical security in many ways.

Secondary complementary balancing compressive imaging with a free-space balanced amplified photodetector

“…The single-pixel detection modality offers more possibilities for the wavelengths where pixelated detectors are technically unavailable or too expensive, such as x-ray, infrared, and terahertz wavelengths. This promising indirect imaging technique [1][2][3], ever since it was proposed, has been intensively studied [4,5] and provided countless novel image measurement ideas in science and engineering fields, including quantum entanglement [6], polarimetric imaging [7], three-dimensional tracking [8], hyperspectral imaging [9], fluorescence microscopy [10], medical imaging [11], compressive holography [12], imaging through scattering media [13], optical encryption [14], etc. Most of them were motivated by compressed sensing (CS) [15][16][17] and ghost imaging [18,19] algorithms.…”

Formation mechanism of correspondence imaging with thermal light

“…As long as the light field of reference arm and the object arm are conjugated, the lenses in GI with thermal light can be removed [8,9], which makes the imaging setup simpler and more flexible. Thus, the thermal light GI has been widely used in many fields, such as microscopic imaging [10], optical encryption [11][12][13] and lidar [14,15]. To solve two key problems existing in GI, i.e., the image quality and measurement number, various GI methods have sprung up, such as background-removal GI [16], differential GI (DGI) [17], adaptive GI [18], iterative denoising GI [19], blind GI [20], super sub-Nyquist GI [21].…”

Fragment-synthesis-based multiparty cryptographic key distribution over a public network

“…During this decade, GI has developed many applications in the fields of lidar [15], microscopy [16] and X-ray radiography [17]. It is worth mentioning that thanks to its random fluctuations of measurements and noisy reconstructed images, GI has become a new favorite in the field of secure optical communication, including image encryption [18,19], cryptographic key distribution [20] and image authentication [21][22][23][24]. However, few GI-based cryptographic key distribution protocols can reduce the sampling ratio while ensuring the efficiency of authentication, without the help of compressed sensing algorithms [25][26][27].…”

“…In this work, we propose a protocol for multiparty cryptographic key distribution over a public network and fragment-synthesis-based identity authen-tication, in a CGI scheme. Compared with the previous works [20,22,24], our approach allows each receiver to simultaneously acquire different cryptographic keys as long as both the server and the receivers are fully trusted via interactive authentication. Additionally, with the help of an intermediary, our scheme can determine whether an attack has occurred.…”