Tapping Fiber is Easy
September 25th, 2007While some of the people who work aboard the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter might laugh at this, I think it’s pretty interesting.
Via: Tech Republic:
Copper cable has been known as the easily tapped physical transmission medium for years. Conscientious network and security managers either provided tight physical security for cabling or used fiber as an alternative. Many network managers considered fiber relatively safe due to the perceived challenges associated with tapping into an optical cable run. However, fiber is no safer than copper.
For less than $1,000, an attacker can purchase the hardware necessary to tap into a fiber run. The tap consists of bending the fiber to the point that it leaks light.
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The fiber cable to be tapped is placed into a micro-bend clamping device (1). The light pulses leaking from the cable are detected by the optical photo detector (2) and sent to an optical-electrical converter (3). The converter changes the light pulses to electrical information that is placed on an Ethernet cable attached to an attacker’s laptop. The laptop, running sniffer software, provides the attacker with a view into the data traveling through the tapped fiber cable.
