Nonlinear optical cryptosystem resistant to standard and hybrid attacks

We propose a nonlinear optical cryptosystem that is resistant to amplitude-phase retrieval attacks, known-plaintext attack and chosen-plaintext attack. A squaring operation is introduced in the encryption path, which thwarts the iterative attacks. This nonlinear operation tends to amplify the error in the estimation during an iterative attack. The decryption process requires the use of a square-root operation. Thus, in the reverse path also, the attacks encounter the nonlinear square-root operation. These two nonlinearities make the iterative attacks unstable, thereby leading to non-convergence of the mean square error (MSE). Our technique is also resistant to hybrid attacks. The technique is general and is shown to work on a variety of images of the type grayscale and binary. Numerical simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed cryptosystem.