All-Optical Encryption Using Multi-Channel Spectral Shuffling

We propose a novel all-optical encryption technique that shuffles spectral slices of multiple wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) channels. In particular, we investigate the application of this technique to two WDM 56-Gb/s quadrature phase-shift keying signals. Simulation results reveal that the encrypted signals could be propagated through transparent optical networks with diameters larger than 500 km and properly decrypted at the receiver. The technique enhances security because it forces eavesdroppers to discover the shuffled slices and to monitor multiple channels to recover data from just one of them.