Abstract

Rapid expansion of computer networks in all aspects of today’s society brings undeniable benefits but also serious security problems. Cryptography is one of the tools which ensures security, integrity and authentication of electronic data. Ever increasing standards for data security urge introducing new, complicated algorithms, or increasing of the key length, which require more computing power and time. Together with the increasing amount of data to be protected this may turn into system bottleneck. To avoid this, new algorithms and architectures are being extensively researched. Optical computing systems may offer valuable alternative with the inherent parallelism and high interconnectivity, allowing encryption of large block of data in parallel using very long key. In this way variety of biometrical data such as fingerprint, retinal or facial images can be used as a key, instead of a short password. This will lead to increase of the security not compromising the speed at the same time. One of the most promising optical architecture is the cellular. A number of optical cellular architectures have been proposed mainly for image processing [3-10]. A promising new application field can be cryptography and random pattern generation. As first attempt in this direction we propose optical implementation of CA rule $a_i^{\text{'}}=a_{i-1}XOR\left(a_{i}OR{a}_{i+1}\right)$ based Stream Cipher, suggested by S. Wolfram [1].

© 1997 Optical Society of America