Comment by jlgreco
12 years ago
> There are a few cable repair ships that pull broken cables to the surface and fix them, but other than that... No one can reach it and no one will bother it.
Even if you pull the cable up to repair it, it is unlikely that you would discover the tap. The device used in Operation Ivy Bells was designed to detach from the cable if the cable was lifted. Non-intrustive tapping might not be possible with fiber (it isn't, as far as I know), but I expect they have other mechanisms to avoid discovery. Perhaps lifting the cable would cause the cable to "snap" on either side of the tap, before the device could be lifted.
Why is the traffic in the fiber cables not encrypted between the endpoints? That would instantly nullify the attacks. Is AES hardware not cheap enough yet?
Traditionally encryption is left to higher layers.