Towards secure Gigabit Passive Optical Networks: Signal propagation based key establishment

Nowadays, the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) technology is widely deployed in broadband access networks. This paper deals with the security issues of Gigabit PON (GPON) standardized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), namely, standard ITU-T G.984 that is widely implemented in Europe these days. We describe and analyze the security of this standard and show its security risks. In spite of that transmitted data are encrypted to provide their confidentiality on a multipoint fibre connection, session secret keys during their establishment can be observed by adversaries. To address this security flaw, we propose a key establishment protocol that securely sets the session secret keys between two communication parties in GPON. Furthermore, we provide the security analysis of the proposed protocol.