[166586] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: latest Snowden docs show NSA intercepts all Google and Yahoo
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Petach)
Thu Oct 31 21:27:10 2013
In-Reply-To: <CAAAwwbVgiOTcUh00ZHAM4--Ag45jWBL1gKXfUE-zPXGBZxUPOA@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 18:26:46 -0700
From: Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com>
To: Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 5:53 PM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 7:24 PM, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com>wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 7:02 AM, Ray Soucy <rps@maine.edu> wrote:
>> > Was the unplanned L3 DF maintenance that took place on Tuesday a frantic
>> > removal of taps? :-)
>>
> No need for intrusive techniques such as direct taps:
>>
>> http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=1494884
>>
>
> For shame.... you've sent in a link to some article behind a paywall,
> with some insane download fee.
> Which is an equivalent of hand-waving.
>
> They must be hiding their content, for fear that flaws be pointed out.
>
Oy...OK, let me find a document that spells it out
a bit more clearly for you.
>
>
> "Of all the techniques, the bent fiber tap is the most easily deployed with
>> minimal risk of damage or detection. The paper quantifies the bend loss
>> required to
>> tap a signal propagating in a single mode fiber"
>>
>
> There will be some wavelengths of light, that may be on the cable, that
> bending won't get a useful signal from.
>
> Bending the cable sufficiently to break the total internal reflection
> property, and allow light to leak -- will generate power losses in the
> cable, that can be identified on an OTDR.
>
This patent covers a technique developed to do
non-intrusive optical tapping with a 0.5" microbend,
with only 0.5dB signal loss:
http://www.google.com/patents/CA2576969C
Most people aren't going to be able to tell a
0.5dB loss from a microbend tap from a splice
job.
Matt
>
>
>
>> Matt
>>
> --
> -JH
>
