Development and security of high-speed key distribution using chaos synchronisation of photonics sources

Protection of sensitive information from interception and eavesdropping has always received a lot of attention. Encryption is used by businesses to protect their corporate secrets, by banks for financial transactions, by governments to secure classified information, and by us all to protect our privacy. Nevertheless, current algorithmic solutions are under threat from ever-growing computational power, while physics-based encryption schemes such as chaos communication and quantum key distribution are either insecure or slow. The goal of this project is to develop complex photonic systems suited for random key synchronization: a new way of encrypting data, with absolute and provable security, in real-time, at current telecom speeds. These systems can be built using off-the-shelf electronic or photonic telecom components making them scalable and therefore fully compatible with present and future commercial telecommunication systems over optical fiber. It will represent a major breakthrough for the ever-increasing demands in information encryption in general and in future photonics networks in particular. We target to achieve the realization and demonstration of a photonics random key synchronization system operating at high speeds. We intend to reach our main objective by following four parallel and complementary approaches: extensive numerical simulations, experiments using electronic circuits, experiments with fast optical systems and targeted side-channel attacks.