Balancing the Demands of Reliability and Security with Linear Network Coding in Optical Networks
This addresses security and reliability issues in optical networks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing LNC techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of balancing reliability and security in optical networks by using Linear Network Coding (LNC) combined with data parallelization and path selection methods, showing that this approach increases security and reliability, and highlighting that without LNC, an attacker could compromise an entire secret by accessing just one network edge.
Recently, physical layer security in the optical layer has gained significant traction. Security treats in optical networks generally impact the reliability of optical transmission. Linear Network Coding (LNC) can protect from both the security treats in form of eavesdropping and faulty transmission due to jamming. LNC can mix original data to become incomprehensible for an attacker and also extend original data by coding redundancy, thus protecting a data from errors injected via jamming attacks. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of LNC to balance reliable transmission and security in optical networks. To this end, we combine the coding process with data flow parallelization of the source and propose and compare optimal and randomized path selection methods for parallel transmission. The study shows that a combination of data parallelization, LNC and randomization of path selection increases security and reliability of the transmission. We analyze the so-called catastrophic security treat of the network and show that in case of conventional transmission scheme and in absence of LNC, an attacker could eavesdrop or disrupt a whole secret data by accessing only one edge in a network.