Burst Control Packet Security in OBS networks

Abstract

Optical networks gained interest due to the inadequacy of electrical networks to handle the rapid growth of bandwidth requirements, as optical networks have significantly higher transmission rates. To efficiently realize optical networks three standards namely; optical packet switching, optical burst switching (OBS).and optical packet switching, were developed o take advantage of wavelength division multiplexing to implement optical communication. In OBS the control packet undergoes Optical-Electrical-Optical (O-E-O) conversion at every intermediate core node. The problem is, if a node is compromised it can subsequently act as a gateway to the entire network and an attacker can have access to the control packet as it undergoes processing at that node. This attacker can then modify any field in the control packet and hence, introduce a number of security concerns by compromising the integrity, confidentiality and integrity of the control packet and by default that of the data burst. This work therefore proposes the development and testing of a secure burst control packet mechanism that uses SHA-256 for per hop authentication to ensure the integrity of the control packet and AES to ensure the confidentiality of the control packet. In the development of the proposed mechanism, experiments showed it was able secure the control packet as it travels throughout the network and maximized network resource utilization without incurring more end-to-end delay. Additionally, the proposed algorithm is faster than asymmetric cryptographic techniques however is slower than symmetric cryptographic techniques. The proposed algorithm can be used instead of asymmetric algorithms as it provides higher throughput and lower end-to-end delay. The proposed algorithm provides maximum resource utilization as such can be used instead of the nodal isolation techniques.