As our lives become increasingly intertwined with the technology around us, privacy concerns are becoming a frontline issue. A team of researchers out of Purdue University have upped the ante against eavesdroppers with a new "temporal cloak" that can effectively hide almost half the data transmitted through fiber optics.
The cloak, the team asserts, can have various commercial and military uses.
"It might be used to prevent communication between people, to corrupt their communication links without them knowing," said Purdue University graduate student Joseph Lukens. "And you can turn it on and off, so if they suspected something strange was going on you could return it to normal communication."
The cloak is referred to as "temporal" because unlike normal cloaks, which conceal physical objects, this one hides data over time, not space.
The time cloak works on the simple principle of waves by using waves generated by phase modulators to effectively cancel out the existing, data-filled light wave traveling through the fiber optic cable.
"By letting them interfere with each other you are able to make them add up to a one or a zero," Lukens said. "The zero is a hole where there is nothing."
That's not all, however. The team also added a second set of phase modulators to "cover up" the hole created by the temporal cloak, making it seem like nothing ever happened.
"It's a potentially higher level of security because it doesn't even look like you are communicating," Lukens said. "Eavesdroppers won't realize the signal is cloaked because it looks like no signal is being sent."
Previous temporal cloaks could barely conceal any data but the new technique allows for a data conceal rate of 46 percent. The team is confident that by further exploring the technique, the percentage of cloaked data could be much higher, and that the system could be practically implemented into commercial markets.
"More work has to be done before this approach finds practical application, but it does use technology that could integrate smoothly into the existing telecommunications infrastructure," Lukens explained.
You can read the full published study in the journal Nature.