Balancing the demands of reliability and security with linear network coding in optical networks

Recently, physical layer security in the optical layer has gained significant traction. Security threats in optical networks generally impact the reliability of optical transmission. Linear Network Coding (LNC) can protect from both the security threats 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 flow parallelization, LNC and randomization of path selection increases security and reliability of the transmission. We analyze the so-called catastrophic security threat 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.