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 t…