Security in all-optical networks: Failure and attack avoidance using self-organization

Abstract

While transparent optical networks become more and more popular as the basis of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) infrastructure, such networks raise many security issues, which do not exist in traditional optoelectronic networks. The existing protection schemes which rely heavily on fault detection due to the use of network monitoring performed by the use of optoelectronic conversion at the switching nodes, is not sufficient to provide security assurance for all optical networks which lack the massive use of optoelectronic monitoring and require timely protection from malicious sabotage as well as inadvertent faults. In order to increase the security of future networks, them will need to use reactive mechanisms and self-organize through multipath routing (MPR) to protect themselves from potential failures caused by malicious new attacks and ordinary reliability problems. If we make the analogy to the human immunization system's primary defense mechanism, MPR will act as the primary defense mechanism reacting timely to network problems and evolving based on network information. In this paper we are proposing the use MPR as an instinct immediate network reaction to failures and attacks in transparent networks; after the nodes transmit the data and causes of failure are classified, better self organized decisions can be used based on changing routing output priorities to reach destination. INTRODUCTIONTransparent all-optical networks (AON) are becoming more and more attractive due to their ability to reduce power consumption and cost based on the less use of transponders in the network, they can also avoid the bottleneck of optoelectronic conversion and switching at each node. However, transparency raises many security vulnerabilities as well as reliability issues which do not exist in traditional optoelectronic networks [1]. In WDM systems, multiple optical signals co-propagate in fiber and optical components, possibly affecting each other directly or indirectly. Then, the quality of a signal is sometimes dependent on or degraded by other signals. Moreover, in a transparent network, it is desired that signals are not regenerated between source and destination unless it is absolutely necessary [2]. It has been discussed in [3] how signals can be maliciously designed to pass through transparent components, causing undesirable effects at remote components and degrading other signals passing through the components. While there are many reliability studies to defeat physical layer impairment problems in AONs, these measures require human intervention to adapt the network to failures that are most likely to happen. Apart from component failures and accidental fiber cuts, networks are vulnerable to attackers capable of disrupting a network from the physical level up to the transport level. Usually, attackers are more interested in failures that can be repeated and controlled, especially if those created failures are rare. In addition, attackers may use automated software to repeatedly cause a fault far more often than i...

All-Optical Networks: Security Issues Analysis

“…In this section, we present a detailed overview of security attacks in AONs, and we mainly focus on the physical-layer security attacks that differ significantly from those in electro-optic and electronic networks and that directly impact the physical infrastructure of AONs. As described in [1,2,6,9,13], physical-layer attacks can be broadly categorized into two main types: SD, which prevents communication or degrades the QoS, and tapping, which compromises privacy by providing unauthorized access to the transmitted data, which can then be used for eavesdropping or traffic analysis purposes. To perform a physical-layer security attack in an AON, an attacker needs an attack method allowing the exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the network physical infrastructure to affect the network security.…”

“…In [1,2,8,9,11,12], the authors present an analysis of the security and management issues that arise in AONs from their peculiar features. In [10,13], the authors propose a self-organization scheme ensuring an autonomous network adaptation against new vulnerabilities, which helps to better protect against potential failures. Another aspect of prevention concerns maintaining data semantic security through the deployment of the optical cryptography scheme [1,2,14].…”

“…Different studies have addressed the security issues in the development of the all-optical networking technology. Actually, various methods have been proposed for attack prevention, detection, localization, and reaction [1][2][3][4]6,8,10,[13][14][15][16]17]. Nevertheless, no robust standards or techniques exist to date for guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) in these networks, and hence the majority of AON security issues are still under study [8,16].…”

On Swarm Intelligence Inspired Self-Organized Networking: Its Bionic Mechanisms, Designing Principles and Optimization Approaches

“…In [96], intelligence is embedded into the optical network to enable it continuously learn from different faults and attacks in a self-organized manner. In [97], a new self-organized method, as analogous to the human immunization system's primary defense mechanism, is proposed to enable the network autonomously and persistently adapt to network changes by learning newly observed vulnerabilities, while at the same time obviate the effort to exploiting already discovered ones. Furthermore, the immune-network theory can also be used to suppress or encourage multi-agent behavior [98] and for approaches such as collaborative mine detection [99].…”

Dynamic flow filtering for All-Optical Networks

“…Due to the sensitivity of the data that can be transmitted across optical networks, strict security requirements should be thought of. Indeed, some optical networks features can be used by an attacker to analyze traffic, eavesdrop, deny service, etc [I], [2], [3]. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to address the protection of optical networks [4], [5].…”