  Optical networks are vulnerable to physical layer attacks; wiretappers can
improperly receive messages intended for legitimate recipients. Our work
considers an aspect of this security problem within the domain of multimode
fiber (MMF) transmission. MMF transmission can be modeled via a broadcast
channel in which both the legitimate receiver's and wiretapper's channels are
multiple-input-multiple-output complex Gaussian channels. Source-channel coding
analyses based on the use of distortion as the metric for secrecy are
developed. Alice has a source sequence to be encoded and transmitted over this
broadcast channel so that the legitimate user Bob can reliably decode while
forcing the distortion of wiretapper, or eavesdropper, Eve's estimate as high
as possible. Tradeoffs between transmission rate and distortion under two
extreme scenarios are examined: the best case where Eve has only her channel
output and the worst case where she also knows the past realization of the
source. It is shown that under the best case, an operationally separate
source-channel coding scheme guarantees maximum distortion at the same rate as
needed for reliable transmission. Theoretical bounds are given, and
particularized for MMF. Numerical results showing the rate distortion tradeoff
are presented and compared with corresponding results for the perfect secrecy
case.
