Sub-Vacuum Jamming for Secure Communication

Abstract

Artificial-noise jamming improves physical-layer security by degrading an eavesdropper's channel, but the injected noise also interferes with the legitimate receiver. We introduce a correlated-jamming protocol based on classical and quantum correlations that suppresses this self-interference while preserving the jamming penalty experienced by the eavesdropper. Bob broadcasts one mode of a correlated two-mode source and retains the second as a local reference. Eve, who has no access to the retained mode, receives the full thermal jamming field, whereas Bob uses an optimized joint measurement to cancel its correlated fluctuations. The residual self-jamming noise is governed by the conditional variance of the transmitted jamming quadrature given the retained reference. Any classically correlated source is bounded by the vacuum-noise floor and therefore restores Bob, at best, to his unjammed receiver noise. An entangled two-mode squeezed source surpasses this limit and produces sub-vacuum residual noise, with the maximum quantum advantage set by the transmissivity of the jamming path back to Bob. In the bright-source regime, this advantage becomes a fixed reduction in Bob's noise floor, independent of the signal and jamming powers. Within a bounded-collection wiretap model, correlated jamming preserves positive secrecy even when Eve has a stronger direct channel than Bob and remains effective against collective measurements on Eve's Gaussian output states. The protocol supports bright classical message transmission and requires no end-to-end quantum channel. Possible applications include shot-noise-limited optical communication, cryogenic microwave networks, and covert or power-constrained secure links.