Secondary-encryption optical chaotic communication system based on one driving laser and two responding lasers

This paper theoretically investigates a secondary-encryption optical chaotic communication system scheme based on an optical injection structure with single optical feedback and dual-dispersion optical feedback lasers. In the scheme, a fiber reflector (FR) and Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) are selected as the laser feedback cavity and effectively conceals time delay signatures (TDSs) of the generated chaotic signals. By switching the responding laser connected to the driving laser with the message feeding method, messages directly participating in the process of encryption signal generation are avoided to generate the first encrypted chaotic sequence that can characterize a message. Subsequently, chaotic phase disturbance technology is used to complete the secondary encryption. By virtue of the spectral broadening effect of chaotic phase disturbance, the message rate and the randomness of the encrypted signal can be effectively enhanced. We use the synchronous power error to decrypt the message at the receiver, which simplifies the system structure and realizes the scheme with low hardware costs. The proposed scheme overcomes the shortcomings of existed schemes, which generate chaotic signal sensitive to channel noise and have complex system structures. In addition, the proposed scheme shows good robustness in terms of handling noise for transmitting digital signals, a bit error rate (BER) of 6.7 × 10−4 at a simulation signal-to-noise ratio of 10 dB, and good application prospects in harsh transmission environments, such as submarine optical fiber transmission.