Numerical Study on Secrecy Capacity and Code Length Dependence of the Performances in Optical Wiretap Channels

Secrecy issues of free-space optical links realizing information theoretically secure communications and high transmission rates are discussed. We numerically study secrecy communication rates of optical wiretap channel based on on–off keying (OOK) modulation under typical conditions met in satellite-ground links. It is shown that, under reasonable degraded conditions on a wiretapper, information theoretically secure communications should be possible in a much wider distance range than a range limit of quantum key distribution, enabling secure optical links between geostationary Earth orbit satellites and ground stations with currently available technologies. We also provide the upper bounds on the decoding error probability and the leaked information to estimate a necessary code length for given required levels of performances. This result ensures that a reasonable length of wiretap channel code for our proposed scheme must exist.