US Patent 7796896 Secure optical communication

A secure optical communication scheme uses differential delay D in an unbalanced Mach-Zehender interferometer to provide two copies of the optical source signal at a remote phase modulator separated in time by D. As D is much bigger than the coherence time source, the two copies of the signal are effectively uncorrelated. Both signals are phase-modulated by the remote sender's data and returned to the unbalanced interferometer. The phase modulator will be converted into amplitude modulation by the action of the interferometer.