Pragmatic Authentication Technique in Fiber Optical Networks

The Passive Optical Network (PON) is recognized as a crucial facilitator of broadband optical access networks globally. The enhanced bandwidth demand has led to generational upgrades in PON technology. These upgrades should also encompass technologies for security enhancements at all network levels. In this paper, we propose a novel authentication technique for enhancing physical layer security in fiber optical networks. This technique enables authentication for the user end, network subsystems, and the optical path, by utilizing their intrinsic individual properties. This method relies on using an optical physical unclonable function (OPUF) approach for optical authentication. We have demonstrated this technique’s performance in point-to-point (P2P) and PON systems for both the user end and Fiber to the X (FTTX) authentication. We compared our proposed authentication technique with existing methods, evaluating their advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost, complexity, and implementation. We assessed the resilience of our proposed technique against critical physical and digital attacks through different metrics.