All-optical networking Was: [Re: Notes on the Internet for Bell Heads]

Fri Jul 12 17:56:27 UTC 2002

At 11:25 PM -0400 7/11/02, Sean Donelan wrote:
>http://www.bell-labs.com/news/features/jaffe.html
>
>  Impact of Optical, MPLS
>  According to Jaffe, advances in network architecture and technology now
>  coming out of Lucent and other companies may have a profound impact on
>  cyber-security in future networks deployed by both service providers and
>  enterprises.
>
>  "Three or four years ago, all-optical switching was considered science
>  fiction, but Lucent is providing a path to that reality with the
>  LambdaRouter," he said. "All-optical networks don't exist yet, but they
>  are coming, and they will greatly reduce vulnerability.
>
>  "It's very hard to intercept individual packets in an all-light network
>  because they aren't queued in output buffers at intermediate nodes. And
>  a lightwave network gives you a better idea of where the packets have come
>  from, which is a problem with the Internet routing protocols today's
>  data networks use."

>I'm afraid this is one of those things I need help translating.  I don't
>understand how an all-optical network improves the security of the IP
>layer.  At best this is "improving" the security of the least vulnerable
>part of the network.  But I could be wrong, and I'm willing to be
>educated.

They don't mention IP at all except by inference via MPLS.

http://www.mplsrc.com/faq1.shtml#MPLS%20History item C talks about migrating
layer 1 and 2 functions up to layer 3.

Maybe their assumption is that by supplanting IP at layer 3 in the
core, they will remove possible angles of attack? Of course, the flip
side of that coin is that they will create new ones.

I would imagine this looking somewhat like the IP stack only being used
at the desktop level. IP would be encapsulated within [insert all-optical
network protocol here] which would be used for the actual transport
and routing.

To take this thought experiment a little farther, in the world I describe
above, my ability to attack individual hosts is still roughly the same,
but my ability to attack the network itself has changed dramatically.

DOS attacks could be easily traced back to individual hosts and squelched,
maybe even automatically. With no global routing table to munge up, it
would be harder to black hole or flood.

Add in the fact that optical sniffing, while not impossible by any means
today, will increasingly become non-trivial as bandwidth increases. Which
is exactly one of the 'problems' they expect optical network to solve.

Regards,

Chris Kilbourn
Founder
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