Security enhanced routing and spectrum allocation against crosstalk attacks for confidential lightpath in elastic optical networks

Abstract

Elastic optical network (EON) is a critical transmission infrastructure for emerging new applications due to its spectral efficiency and flexibility. Nowadays, numerous confidential lightpaths (CLPs) are carried over EON to support security-sensitive users. However, they are vulnerable to crosstalk attacks at the optical layer, typically aimed at eavesdropping on the carried data or even disrupting connections. Due to the transparent nature of the optical signals, such attacks are difficult to detect and could last for a long time, resulting in data leakage even spreading throughout the network. This paper presents a novel routing and spectrum allocation (RSA) algorithm to protect CLPs from crosstalk attacks. We investigate intra-channel and inter-channel crosstalk attacks and develop a metric to quantify crosstalk leakage risks (CLRs). We first formulate an ILP model to plan CLPs with a minimum CLR. To solve the same problem for large-scale networks, we also propose a heuristic algorithm, i.e., crosstalk-attack-aware RSA. Results indicate that the proposed algorithm is capable of reducing CLR by 23%.