A Polarization-Modulated Information Metasurface for Encryption Wireless Communications

Programmable and information metasurfaces have shown great potentials in wireless communications, but there are few reports on encrypted communications. In this paper, a programmable polarization-modulated (PoM) information metasurface is proposed, which can not only customize arbitrarily linearly polarized reflected waves, but also modulate their amplitudes in real time. Based on this feature, a physical-level wireless communication encryption scheme is presented and experimentally demonstrated by introducing a meta-key, which can be encrypted and sent by the programmable PoM information metasurface. To be specific, the key is encoded and concealed into different linear polarization channels, and then modulated and transmitted by the information metasurface at the transmitting end. At the receiving end, the modulated signal can be received and decoded by using a pair of polarization discrimination antennas. A wireless transceiver system is established to verify the feasibility of the scheme. It is shown that, once the meta-key is obtained, the corresponding encrypted target information that has been sent to the user in advance can be recovered.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a programmable polarization-modulated information metasurface for wireless communication encryption. The encoding and hiding of a meta-key in different linear polarization channels, modulation and transmission using the information metasurface, and reception and decoding using polarization discrimination antennas are demonstrated. The feasibility of the scheme is verified through a wireless transceiver system.