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The Military Aims to Develop 'Smart' & Secure WiFi
Krishna Dagli writes to mention a Network World article about a military project to create a self-configuring, secure wireless network. From the article: "Academic concepts such as artificial intelligence and Tim Berners-Lee's 'Semantic Web,' combined with technologies such as the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), cognitive radio, and peer-to-peer networking, would provide the nuts and bolts of such a network. Although the project is intended for soldiers in the field, the resulting advances could trickle down to end users. 'Military networks are going to converge as closely as we can to civil technologies,' says Preston Marshall, the program manager of DARPA's Advanced Technology Office."
reverse-engineered Goa'uld technology?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The technology was first called the Online Occupation Infrastructure and Logistics network, but they thought the acronym would not be wise.
Well, when I was a youth I worked on the ARPA Network, a DARPA funded experiment in how networks recover from individual route failures. Well the technology grew up into the Internet. The US government wasn't pleased when they couldn't bomb away Saddam's communications network. It came out later that he used internet technology and that's why his network recovered so well. Now DARPA would like to do the same thing with inexpensive wireless devices. The technology is coming anyway, the genie is almost out of the bottle for good. Wirless networking is a disruptive technology that is inexpensive and flexible, I like it. I had a dream the other night about being a wireless guru and working with the south american rebels in the forest on their wireless network. Very exciting and dangerous. It would make a good movie.
Wireless ad hoc nets have two major points of vulnerability: they are vulnerable to routing protocol attacks, and they consist of nodes with finite energy reserves.
I would disagree with the assertion in the article that current routing protocols are insufficient to handle MANETs. MANET routing protocols are slightly different (most are adaptations of traditional protocols), but if implemented correctly, they can support networks with very high rates of topology change... this has been supported by the literature for years now.
What the protocols are lacking is resistance from spoofing attacks that confound or exploit the "intelligence" of the adaptive routing protocols, and attacks on battery energy that coax nodes to use more energy or target and overwhelm key nodes. This has to be addresses in the lower layers as suggested by the article. So it's no surprise that the trend has been to develop "underlay" meshing protocols instead of traditional layer 3 routing schemes, because all of the security has to be built into layers 1 and 2 anyway on account of the fact that traffic can be easily sniffer or injected by passers by.
Don't assume that it is so easily jammed.
You assume that the wireless will be on a normal frequency. They could use spead spectrum or UWB. They could use light frequencies like infrared to carry the signal.
"But who'd suspect,
A military intelligence.
Two words combined that can't make sense."
Megadeth - Hangar 18
Registered Linux user #421033
MANET
Hmm that doesn't sound sexist in any way. Why not call it the WOMANET?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
in theory, this is precisely what the cognitive radio (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio) would fix. assuming you've got a sufficiently wide spectrum that it can't all be jammed at once, the radio will detect which portions of the spectrum are being jammed and transmit in clear bands. of course, that's all in theory. in practice, who knows?
"wardriving"
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
Use this network, which essentially configures and extends itself where needed, as needed, to deliver HDTV, phone and Internet over IP. Wired, wireless or satellite - the network should be smart enough to use whatever means it has, but dumb enough to not care about what kind of traffic it routes, just that it does as good a job as possible with the available hardware. Automatically multi-link, it would route most of your p2p traffic through fibers while your VoIP goes wireless to your headset. Built-in authentication and encryption to keep your gadgets in touch and your data secure, even though you use someone elses hardware as well as let other use yours.
It's mesh networking, FON, cellphones, multicast and wimax, all the hype rolled into one big network. And no, we shall not call it Skynet.
Money for nothing, pix for free