On the design of chaos-based secure communication systems

This paper discusses the topic of using chaotic models for constructing secure communication systems. It investigates three different case studies that use encryption/decryption functions with varying degrees of complexity and performance. The first case study explores synchronization of identical chaotic systems, which is considered the most crucial step when developing chaos-based secure communication systems. It proposes a fast mechanism for synchronizing the transmitter and the receiver that is based on the drive-response approach. The superiority and causality of this mechanism is demonstrated via contrasting its performance and practical implementation against that of the traditional method of Pecora and Carroll. The second case study explores the use of an improved cryptography method for improving the scrambling of the transmitted signals. The improvement is based on using both the transmitter states and parameters for performing the encryption. The security analysis of this method is analyzed, highlighting its advantages and limitation, via simulating intruder attacks to the communication channel. Finally, the third case study augments a parameter update law to the previous two designs such that the encryption method is more robust. It uses a decoupling technique for which the synchronization process is completely isolated from the parameter identification algorithm. The Lorenz system was used to exemplify all the suggested techniques, and the transmission of both analog and digital signals was explored, while investigating various techniques to optimize the performance of the proposed systems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.