Photon-counting imaging based double-random-phase encryption for information security and verification

The integration of photon-counting imaging techniques to optical encryption systems permits to increase information authentication robustness against intruder attacks. Photon-counting imaging generates distributions with only few photons and provides substantial bandwidth reduction by requiring only a sparse encrypted data. We show that photon-limited encrypted distributions have sufficient information for decryption, authentication and signal retrieval. Different approaches to compress the information on encrypted distributions are considered and analyzed.