Overview

To establish a bulwark of security for the safety of communications, minimum requirements are

• Confidentiality

• Authentication

• Integrity

• Non-repudiation

A further item that might be added to this list is

• Secure remote access

Secure remote access implies confidential communication of specific items like passwords, challenge-response dialogs, cryptographic keys, session keys, or initialization vectors (IVs), also known as seeding values. These values must be corroborated through authentication servers, which approve or disapprove according to specific security policies, any access to the IT resources the legitimate user seeks to obtain.1

These aspects of communications security deal with content and usage security. There are indeed other aspects of communications security, just as there are also other types of attacks:

• Denial of service

• Jamming

• Interception

Denial of service (DoS) is a highly publicized type of attack in the packet-communications world. Damage occurs when hackers flood servers with SYN requests that ultimately bring down functionality as the server runs short of bandwidth. An example of a SYN-flood attack is the 2000 overseas-originated DoS attack that crippled e-bay and Amazon for two days at an estimated cost of $100,000 per hour to each company.

Fear of interception is always prevalent in the wireless communications world, in some networks more than in others. These days it is within almost everyone s grasp to intercept an analog modulated signal using inexpensive and rather unsophisticated off-the-shelf scanners. Things become somewhat more complicated to the average wireless user as technologies...