On the Atmospheric Turbulence-Based Cryptosystems With High Secret-Key Rate

In our recent paper, we proposed using the atmospheric turbulent channel as a source of randomness to simultaneously address various challenges in physical-layer security (PLS), quantum key distribution (QKD), and post-quantum cryptography (PQC). However, the long coherence time of atmospheric turbulence channels limits the achievable secret-key rates (SKRs). To address this issue, we initially leveraged the turbulence effects only during the system’s initialization phase. In this paper, we present a source-based secret key generation scheme that overcomes the limitations imposed by the long coherence time of the turbulent channel, without requiring initialization. The scheme utilizes both atmospheric turbulence and background radiation as sources of randomness. It offers security superior to PQC and is comparable to QKD, while enabling significantly higher SKRs, making it fully compatible with state-of-the-art optical communications.