Balancing the Demands of Reliability and Security with Linear Network Coding in Optical Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores how Linear Network Coding (LNC) combined with data parallelization and randomized path selection enhances security and reliability in optical networks, effectively balancing protection against eavesdropping and jamming.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach integrating LNC with data flow parallelization and path randomization to improve security and reliability in optical networks.

Findings

LNC combined with data parallelization increases security and reliability.

Randomized path selection further enhances transmission robustness.

Conventional schemes without LNC are vulnerable to single-edge attacks.

Abstract

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.