What is optical encryption?

Optical encryption is a means of securing in-flight data in the transport layer of the network as it is carried over optical waves across fiber-optic cables.

After a series of high-profile breaches and data leaks, cybersecurity is now a boardroom-level concern.

Unlike some other hot topics, there’s a lot more to cybersecurity than the hype. Add the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the proliferation of diverse data centers to the breaches and data leaks, and the old perimeter defense strategy just doesn’t work. It’s a PR and economic disaster waiting to happen.

As a result, organizations are revisiting their security strategies to ensure they are doing everything they can to protect their data.

Traditional in-flight data encryption solutions have been around for a while, but can present a number of challenges, including painful key management, increased latency, inefficient use of bandwidth, and the need for application-specific hardware, which adds to the complexity of managing the network.

With in-flight data increasingly being carried over longer distances across 10G, 100G, and 200G waves, optical encryption is a growing means of protecting high-capacity data as it crosses cities, countries, and borders.

Encryption of in-flight data at the optical layer has significant advantages over traditional encryption solutions that operate at higher layers of the network. Optical encryption delivers maximum throughput without impacting performance and transparent transport of any protocol without additional hardware, as the solution integrates directly into the network element. This translates into a low-latency encryption solution that’s more bandwidth-efficient and doesn’t require a separate network appliance.

Optical encryption is a means of securing in-flight data in the transport layer of the network as it is carried over optical waves across fiber-optic cables.

Network services should be easy to deploy and scale for both the service provider and customer.

This is where Ciena’s WaveLogic Encryption shines, by providing a cost-effective, simple-to-implement bulk-encryption solution that protects all in-flight traffic on the network as it spans the globe. It offers MyCryptoTool—a simple-to-use, dedicated encryption management end-user portal designed for distributed management of the network. This enables the owner of the critical data, the end-user, to independently manage the encryption security parameters and alarms of their 10G, 100G, or 200G encrypted services remotely.

WaveLogic Encryption is purpose-built with the highest level of in-flight data security, offering the following key features:

Always-on encryption that guarantees that all traffic is always encrypted 24X7

External third-party certification to ensure that it is implemented with industry-standard algorithms, including a FIPS-certified AES-256 encryption engine

Two distinct, independent sets of keys for authentication and data encryption functions

Fast encryption key rotation interval down to the second (instead of minutes)

WaveLogic Encryption is the industry’s first programmable 100G/200G optical encryption solution. It builds on years of experience in coherent optics as well as in transport-layer encryption, delivering a simple-to-implement, always-on encryption solution over any distance, from metro to submarine. Now it’s easier than ever for customers to deploy 10G, 100G, or 200G encrypted services across their entire infrastructure, eliminating costly separate encryption boxes per application, which are cumbersome to deploy and impossible to manage with the increasing number of end-users running their own applications over the network.

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