This is a proposal requesting consideration for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) award. This proposal describes a one-year activity in which the PI will conduct investigations on secure information systems tailored to optoelectronic and optical systems by taking the advantage of the parallelism, large bandwidth and interconnections of optics. By properly encoding of secure data using optoelectronic A/D and interferometric methods, the encrypted data can be sent over the optical or electronic networks securely. Multi-dimensional keys using many degrees of freedom in optics increases the number of mathematical possibilities to break a code. Potential applications include protection of information assets, database security, personal verification and identification from remote sites, document security and surveillance. The proposed work is to demonstrate the feasibility of the optical encoding techniques. ***
