Collision in a phase-only asymmetric cryptosystem based on interference and phase-truncated Fourier transforms

In this paper, the security strength of a phase-only asymmetric cryptosystem based on interference and phase-truncated Fourier transforms (PTFTs) has been evaluated. Compared to the conventional PTFTs-based scheme where the plaintext is directly encoded into two phase masks (PMs) and the ciphertext, here the plaintext is firstly converted to the phase-only distribution by PTFTs-based encryption process I, and then modulated by the encryption process II with the aid of two masks generated by a carrier image. The security strength of this cryptosystem has been enhanced by an additional secure layer for the output of PTFTs-based structure. Moreover, the four masks generated in the encryption processes I and II are required for the decryption also, it enlarges the key space which further ensures the security strength of the improved cryptosystem. However, we noticed that the carrier image used to generate one of private keys is same as the ciphertext when the input of the encryption is the zero matrix. Thus, the amplitude mask (AM) as the private key could be recovered by the designed chosen-plaintext attack, and then it can be used as the known parameter in the iterative attacks. Employing the recovered mask, two specific attacks with different constraints are designed to break the cryptosystem based on interference and PTFTs successfully. Based on our cryptoanalysis, it is found that most information of the plaintexts were encoded into the AM and the PM in the encryption process I, and silhouette problem would be caused when one of these keys is known. Numerical simulations have been carried out to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of proposed hybrid attacks.