Thursday, October 12, 2006

New Secure Communications over Fiber? Probably not for FTTH

This looks interesting, but only for a point to point connection. Which means that with my fiber to the home, I cannot send new extra sneaky messages to my neighbors. Especially since I am on switched ethernet over fiber and I probably can't afford the hardware.

I took a quick look through the document, and I am sure I missed most of it, but off hand I don't see how you get past any network device or repeater (assuming that the repeater is not repeating noise).



A method for secure communications over a public fiber-optical network

Abstract
We develop a spread-spectrum based approach to secure communications over existing fiber-optical networks. Secure transmission for a dedicated user is achieved by overlaying a covert channel onto a host channel in the existing active fiber link. The covert channel is optically encoded and temporally spread, and has average power below the noise floor in the fiber, making it hidden for a direct detection thus allowing for cryptographic and steganographic security capabilities. The presence for the host channel in the network provides an ad hoc security expansion and increases the difficulty for an eavesdropper to intercept and decode the secure signal.

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