Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 361860, 18 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/361860
Research Article

Cryptanalysis of a Chaotic Communication Scheme Using Parameter Observer

Haipeng Peng,1,2,3 Yan Shao,1,2,3 Lixiang Li,1,2,3 and Yixian Yang1,2,3

1Information Security Center, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, P.O. Box 145, Beijing 100876, China
2Key Laboratory of Network and Information Attack and Defence Technology of MOE, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
3National Engineering Laboratory for Disaster Backup and Recovery, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China

Received 17 October 2009; Accepted 3 December 2009

Academic Editor: Massimo Scalia

Copyright © 2010 Haipeng Peng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper addresses the cryptanalysis of a secure communication scheme proposed by Wu (2006), where the information signal is modulated into a system parameter of a unified chaotic system. It is demonstrated that a parameter observer can be designed to identify the parameter determined by the transmitted information and then the transmitted information can be obtained. Compared with the existing analysis using adaptive observer, the cryptanalysis based on parameter observer is much simpler and needs less structure information of the transmitter system. With numerical simulations, it is shown that the parameter observer has stronger practicality and robustness. Furthermore, it is still possible to obtain the transmitted information, even if the derivative of the transmitted signal is unknown.