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Software defined optical networks secured by quantum key distribution (QKD)

Optical network security is attracting increasing research interest. Currently, software defined optical network (SDON) has been proposed to increase network intelligence, which is gradually moving towards industrialization. However, new threats are emerging, e.g., control messages transferred via the control channels are vulnerable to eavesdropping and interception. Data encryption is an effective way to enhance the security of connection as well as control messages transferred in SDON. Noticeably, quantum key distribution (QKD) is being considered as a secure mechanism to provision keys for confidential data encryption, which is a potential technique to protect communications from security attacks in SDONs. How to utilize QKD to enhance the SDON security is emerging as a new issue. This paper proposes a novel QKD-enabled SDON architecture, and discusses some open issues and challenges such as resource allocation, security level, trusted repeater node placement and resiliency under such an architecture. Moreover, this paper also proposes an algorithmic solution to resource allocation issue and describes some illustrative simulation results.