Security threats and protection procedures for optical networks

Abstract

This study addresses the issues of optical network survivability to attacks in the optical physical layer. The authors comprehensively review and discuss the vulnerability of optical networks towards various types of security threats that could appear in the network optical layer: passive eavesdropping attacks and active optical attacks like in-band jamming, out-of-band crosstalk attacks, amplifier attacks and physical infrastructure attacks. They describe and discuss several protection procedures and monitoring techniques to improve network attack survivability. Numerical simulation performances of some attacks and protection schemes are also provided.