posted on 2024-01-23, 08:30authored byZejing Wang, Mengyu Niu, Wenjia Zhao, Zhuowen Wang, Shuai Wan, Yangyang Shi, Xin Shan, Zhongyang Li
Information
security is of vital importance in daily life, stimulating
various cryptographic strategies to protect data from leaking. Among
them, metasurface-based optical encryption is an excellent candidate
because of its unique features, including numerous encoding channels
and incomparable light-field manipulation ability. However, for state-of-the-art
metasurface encryption, it is still critical to further improve its
storage efficiency with high security for practical information-storage
applications. Here, combining data compression and optical encryption,
compression-encrypted meta-optics (CEM) is proposed to improve the
regular metasurface storage efficiency by an order of magnitude while
maintaining high information security. Utilizing lossless compression
algorithms, the plaintexts are re-encoded into nonintuitive ciphertexts
and keys with much less data volume (∼1/10), thus providing
the first security barrier and increasing storage efficiency. Moreover,
the polarization-encrypted metasurfaces also protect the ciphertexts
from direct observation, providing a second security barrier. Overall,
such a CEM with two security barriers significantly improves the optical
storage efficiency and presents a novel route for potential applications
in next-generation optical information storage/encryption.