Physical secure key distribution based on chaotic self-carrier phase modulation and time-delayed shift keying of synchronized optical chaos

High speed physical secure key distribution in a classical optical fiber channel is unprecedentedly desired for modern secure communication, but it still remains a worldwide technical challenge. In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel high-speed physical secure key distribution scheme based on chaotic optical signal processing and private hardware modules, which employs chaotic self-carrier phase modulation for chaotic bandwidth expansion and time-delayed shift keying of commonly driven synchronized optical chaos for physical layer security. In this scheme, the entropy source rate of synchronized chaos output from two remote response lasers is greatly expanded by chaotic self-carrier delayed nonlinear phase disturbance, which facilitates high speed key extraction from the entropy source with guaranteed randomness. Moreover, a synchronization recovery time of sub-nanosecond is achieved by dynamic keying of the chaotic delay time after chaos synchronization to accelerate the key distribution rate. Based on the proposed scheme, a high physical key distribution rate of 2.1 Gb/s over 40 km is successfully demonstrated in the experiment. The proposed solution provides a promising strategy for future high-speed key distribution based on chaotic optical signal processing and classical fiber channel. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement