Design of secure digital communication systems using chaotic modulation, cryptography and chaotic synchronization

This paper presents a secure digital communication system based on chaotic modulation, cryptography, and chaotic synchronization techniques. The proposed system consists of a Chaotic Modulator (CM), a Chaotic Secure Transmitter (CST), a Chaotic Secure Receiver (CSR) and a Chaotic Demodulator (CDM). The CM module incorporates a chaotic system and a novel Chaotic Differential Peaks Keying (CDPK) modulation scheme to generate analog patterns corresponding to the input digital bits. The CST and CSR modules are designed such that a single scalar signal is transmitted in the public channel. Furthermore, by giving certain structural conditions of a particular class of chaotic system, the CST and the nonlinear observer-based CSR with an appropriate observer gain are constructed to synchronize with each other. These two slave systems are driven simultaneously by the transmitted signal and are designed to synchronize and generate appropriate cryptography keys for encryption and decryption purposes. In the CDM module, a nonlinear observer is designed to estimate the chaotic modulating system in the CM. A demodulation mechanism is then applied to decode the transmitted input digital bits. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated through the numerical simulation of an illustrative communication system. Synchronization between the chaotic circuits of the transmitter and receiver modules is guaranteed through the Lyapunov stability theorem. Finally, the security features of the proposed system in the event of attack by an intruder in either the time domain or the frequency domain are discussed. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.