Telstra trials data encryption of intercity backbone network

Telstra and its equipment suppliers Ericsson and Ciena said they have demonstrated strong encryption of data traffic over optical circuits on the telco's production network between Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, with close to no additional overhead.

Source: Ciena

High-speed encryption at 200 gigabits per second was achieved with Ciena's WaveLogic 3 Extreme transponder, which has built-in data scrambling capabilities through the use of an application specific integrated circuit, the parties said.

WaveLogic 3 Extreme cards can provide optical-layer encryption capabilites at 100Gbps using quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation. The transponder can reach 200Gbps using 16 quadrature amplitude modulation.

The encryption is protocol agnostic, as the entire wavelength of light is scrambled before it enters the network, meaning different types of traffic such as Ethernet, SONET, SDH and Fibre Net can all be protected without having to individually encode/decode them.

Ciena's encryption technology is certified to United States federal information processing standards (FIPS) 140-2 Level 2 and 197. It uses US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliant advanced encryption standard (AES) 256-bit session keys that are autonomously negotiated and rotated every second, independently, and on each line port.

Enterprise customers will have the option to manage the encryption themselves using Ciena's MyCryptoTool portal, or let Telstra do it for them.