Secure optical communications

The security issues we address are particularly relevant to all-optical networks, but many are also applicable to the optical portions of electro-optic networks. Optical communication, by virtue of the high rates and low BERs they offer, suffer particularly strenuously from denial of service attacks. A short attack, which might only affect a small number of bits in a slower electronic network, may affect a very large number of bits in optical communications. The very light coding and simple signaling, such as OOK, commonly used on optical transmissions renders them vulnerable to service degradations