On the physical layer security of visible light communications empowered by gold nanoparticles

Visible light is a proper spectrum for secure wireless communications because of its high directivity and impermeability in indoor scenarios. However, if an eavesdropper is located very close to a legitimate receiver, secure communications become highly risky. In this paper, to further increase the level of security of visible light communication (VLC) and increase its resilience to malicious attacks, we propose to capitalize on the recently synthesized gold nanoparticles (GNPs) with chiroptical properties for circularly polarized light resulting in the phase retardation that interacts with the linear polarizer angle. GNP plates made by judiciously stacking many GNPs perform as physical secret keys. Transmitters send both the intended symbol and artificial noise to exploit the channel variation effect by the GNP plates, which is highly effective when an eavesdropper is located close to the legitimate receiver. A new, to our knowledge, VLC channel model is first developed by representing the effect of GNP plates and linear polarizers in the circular polarization domain. Based on the new channel model, the angles of linear polarizers at the transmitters and legitimate receiver are optimized considering the effect of GNP plates to increase the secrecy rate in wiretapping scenarios. Simulations verify that, when the transmitters are equipped with GNP plates, even if the eavesdropper is located right next to the legitimate receiver, insightful results on the physical layer security metrics are gained as follows: (1) the secrecy rate is significantly improved, and (2) the symbol error rate gap between the legitimate receiver and eavesdropper becomes much larger due to the chiroptical properties of GNP plates.