Known-plaintext attack on the double phase encoding and its implementation with parallel hardware

A known-plaintext attack on the double phase encryption scheme implemented with parallel hardware is presented. The double random phase encoding (DRPE) is one of the most representative optical cryptosystems developed in mid of 90's and derives quite a few variants since then. Although the DRPE encryption system has a strong power resisting to a brute-force attack, the inherent architecture of DRPE leaves a hidden trouble due to its linearity nature. Recently the real security strength of this opto-cryptosystem has been doubted and analyzed from the cryptanalysis point of view. In this presentation, we demonstrate that the optical cryptosystems based on DRPE architecture are vulnerable to known-plain text attack. With this attack the two encryption keys in the DRPE can be accessed with the help of the phase retrieval technique. In our approach, we adopt hybrid input-output algorithm (HIO) to recover the random phase key in the object domain and then infer the key in frequency domain. Only a plaintext-ciphertext pair is sufficient to create vulnerability. Moreover this attack does not need to select particular plaintext. The phase retrieval technique based on HIO is an iterative process performing Fourier transforms, so it fits very much into the hardware implementation of the digital signal processor (DSP). We make use of the high performance DSP to accomplish the known-plaintext attack. Compared with the software implementation, the speed of the hardware implementation is much fast. The performance of this DSP-based cryptanalysis system is also evaluated.