PHYSec: A Novel Physical Layer Security Architecture for Ethernet

Abstract

Recent years have seen a significant increase in demand for security in Ethernet. In this paper, we propose a novel physical layer security architecture (PHYSec) for Ethernet, operating at the low layer of physical coding sublayer (PCS). Compared to existing encryption schemes, PHYSec provides the following benefits: 1) low overhead due to constructing encryption objects without the restriction of frame size and utilizing native markers to carry security parameters; 2) high security for completely hiding the traffic pattern.