Physical layer security in light-fidelity systems

Security Challenges for Light Emitting Systems

Although visible light communication (VLC) channels are more secure than radio frequency channels, the broadcast nature of VLC links renders them open to eavesdropping. As a result, VLC networks must provide security in order to safeguard the user’s data from eavesdroppers. In the literature, keyless security techniques have been developed to offer security for VLC. Even though these techniques provide strong security against eavesdroppers, they are difficult to deploy. Key generation algorithms are critical for securing wireless connections. Nonetheless, in many situations, the typical key generation methods may be quite complicated and costly. They consume scarce resources, such as bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a novel key extraction procedure that uses error-correcting coding and one time pad (OTP) to improve the security of VLC networks and the validity of data. This system will not have any interference problems with other devices. We also explain error correction while sending a message across a network, and suggest a change to the Berlekamp–Massey (BM) algorithm for error identification and assessment. Because each OOK signal frame is encrypted by a different key, the proposed protocol provides high physical layer security; it allows for key extraction based on the messages sent, so an intruder can never break the encryption system, even if the latter knows the protocol with which we encrypted the message; our protocol also enables for error transmission rate correction and bit mismatch rates with on-the-fly key fetch. The results presented in this paper were performed using MATLAB.

Optical wireless communication

Optical wireless communication has attracted significant interest recently in industry and academia. This special issue features a collection of inter-related papers with the intention to cover all necessary multidisciplinary challenges to realize optical wireless networks. We hope that this special issue will serve as a comprehensive reference and that it will be a resource which fosters many more new ideas for this rapidly emerging field. This article is part of the theme issue 'Optical wireless communication'.