Trusted Passive Optical Networks Access Authentication Using Distance Conditioned Bit Error Rate Fingerprinting and a Permissioned Blockchain

To address credential cloning and limited auditability in passive optical networks (PONs), we present a simulation-based proof of concept for access authentication that integrates distance-conditioned bit-error-rate (BER) fingerprinting with a permissioned blockchain.A BER-distance reference template is constructed under registered link conditions.During authentication, normalized deviations between real-time pre-forward-error-correction BER and registered references serve as channel fingerprints for physical-layer authentication, while an adaptive threshold, calibrated on simulated legitimate observations, assesses physical-path consistency.Nonce-bound signed measurement evidence supports auditable authorization through practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus.On an independent simulated test set, the validation-selected threshold yields a false rejection rate of 0.493% and a false acceptance rate of 0.019%; the uncertainty-scaled, relative, and absolute BER-deviation measures yield area under the curve values of 0.99999, 0.99990, and 0.90524, respectively.The results support feasibility under the modeled conditions; hardware validation remains necessary, and compensation attacks limit BER-based discrimination.