Browsing by Author "Hu, Wenxiu"

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    Eavesdropping against bidirectional physical layer secret key generation in fiber communications
    (IEEE, 2022-12-14) Hu, Wenxiu; Wei, Zhuangkun; Leeson, Mark; Xu, Tianhua
    Physical layer secret key exploits the random but reciprocal channel features between legitimate users to encrypt their data against fiber-tapping. We propose a novel tapping-based eavesdropper scheme, leveraging its tapped signals from legitimate users to reconstruct their common features and the secret key.
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    Hamming–Luby rateless codes for molecular erasure channels
    (Elsevier, 2019-11-27) Wei, Zhuangkun; Li, Bin; Hu, Wenxiu; Guo, Weisi; Zhao, Chenglin
    Nano-scale molecular communications encode digital information into discrete macro-molecules. In many nano-scale systems, due to limited molecular energy, each information symbol is encoded into a small number of molecules. As such, information may be lost in the process of diffusion–advection propagation through complex topologies and membranes. Existing Hamming-distance codes for additive counting noise are not well suited to combat the aforementioned erasure errors. Rateless Luby-Transform (LT) code and cascaded Hamming-LT (Raptor) are suitable for information-loss, however may consume substantially computational energy due to the repeated uses of random number generator and exclusive OR (XOR). In this paper, we design a novel low-complexity erasure combating encoding scheme: the rateless Hamming–Luby Transform code. The proposed rateless code combines the superior efficiency of Hamming codes with the performance guarantee advantage of Luby Transform (LT) codes, therefore can reduce the number of random number generator utilizations. We design an iterative soft decoding scheme via successive cancelation to further improve the performance. Numerical simulations show this new rateless code can provide comparable performance comparing with both standard LT and Raptor codes, while incurring a lower decoder computational complexity, which is useful for the envisaged resources constrained nano-machines
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    Tapping eavesdropper designs against physical layer secret key in point-to-point fiber communications
    (IEEE, 2022-11-17) Hu, Wenxiu; Wei, Zhuangkun; Popov, Sergei; Leeson, Mark; Xu, Tianhua
    With the growing demand for service access and data transmission, security issues in optical fiber systems have become increasingly important and the subject of increased research. Physical layer secret key generation (PL-SKG), which leverages the random but common channel properties at legitimate parties, has been shown to be a secure, low-cost, and easily deployed technique as opposed to computational-based cryptography, quantum, and chaos key methods that rely on precise equipment. However, the eavesdropper (Eve) potential for current PL-SKG in fiber communications has been overlooked by most studies to date. Unlike wireless communications, where the randomness comes from the spatial multi-paths that cannot be all captured by Eves, in fiber communications, all the randomness (from transmitted random pilots or channel randomness) is contained in the signals transmitted inside the fiber. This, therefore, enables a tapping Eve to reconstruct the common features of legitimate users from its received signals, and further decrypt the featured-based secret keys. To implement this idea, we designed two Eve schemes against polarization mode distortion (PMD) based PL-SKG and the two-way cross multiplication based PL-SKG. The simulation results show that our proposed Eves can successfully reconstruct the legitimate common feature and the secret key relied upon, leading to secret key rate (SKR) reductions of between three and four orders of magnitude in the PL-SKG schemes studied. As a result, we reveal and demonstrate a novel eavesdropping potential to provide challenges for current physical layer secret key designs. We hope to provide more insightful vision and critical evaluation on the design of new physical layer secret key schemes in optical fiber links, to provide more comprehensively secure, and intelligent optical networks.