Securing optical monitoring ports of transmission network elements

Today's core optical networks are a key asset for companies and countries. Optical technology is moving towards to the end user and is becoming pervasive and no more restricted to secure locations as it was in the past. We review some attacks and countermeasures that may occur in all-optical networks. Then we concentrate on the external optical monitoring points whose purpose is to enable proper operations. We outline some related security issues and propose possible countermeasures.