In this paper, we propose a novel optical implementation of a 3DES algorithm based on dual XOR logic operations for a cryptographic system. In the schematic architecture, the optical 3DES system consists of dual XOR logic operations, where XOR logic operation is implemented by using a free-space interconnected optical logic gate method. The main point in the proposed 3DES method is to make a higher secure cryptosystem, which is acquired by encrypting an individual private key separately, and this encrypted private key is used to decrypt the plain text from the cipher text. Schematically, the proposed optical configuration of this cryptosystem can be used for the decryption process as well. The major advantage of this optical method is that vast 2-D data can be processed in parallel very quickly regardless of data size. The proposed scheme can be applied to watermark authentication and can also be applied to the OTP encryption if every different private key is created and used for encryption only once. When a security key has data of $512{ imes}256$ pixels in size, our proposed method performs 2,048 DES blocks or 1,024 3DES blocks cipher in this paper. Besides, because the key length is equal to $512{ imes}256$ bits, $2^{512{ imes}256}$ attempts are required to find the correct key. Numerical simulations show the results to be carried out encryption and decryption successfully with the proposed 3DES algorithm.