Secure fiberoptic communications

At the heart of our current information explosion is the communication network. Networks are now an intrinsic part of our daily activities, whether they are for Internet business transactions or military communications in Future Combat Systems. Protection of this communication infrastructure is a must. In this article, we discuss two approaches for securing all-optical networks. The first is an optical encryption technique that denies the information to intruders. The second is an authentication scheme capable of detecting and identifying unauthorized users.