Louis M. Parks
CEO, SecureRF Corporation

Every day we rely on aging security technologies, some more than 30 years old, to protect our country’s infrastructure and, unlike fine wines, these technologies do not age well. We are also seeing a continual increase in the computing power available to penetrate and attack these aging systems, which makes it even harder to maintain a secure world. 

These problems are further compounded with the introduction of ever smaller computing systems that often cannot even run these aging security technologies. We especially see this issue with resource-constrained or performance-sensitive devices like wireless sensor networks, RFID tags, microcontrollers and machine-to-machine (M2M) devices that may be at the very heart of our country’s infrastructure now or in the near future — making us vulnerable to a whole new type of terrorist attack.  

Science fiction, thriller novels, and movies have helped us imagine the world to come, and the view is very sobering. A recent example is the movie Live Free or Die Hard, the fourth movie in the Die Hard series, in which a group of thieves masquerading as terrorists systematically shut down the United States computer systems that manage most of the public infrastructure. How far away are we from such a scenario?

A recent Business Week article stated, “The smart grid, the smart highway, and the smart water pipeline need lots of data, and most of that data is going to be collected in remote locations — say, wind farms and water reservoirs in Kansas — or from many distributed users. Pulling that data in is going to require large networks of sensors, most of which will be based on some form of low-power wireless technology.” The next generation of wireless technology is going to create some of the greatest cybersecurity challenges of our times, and it is critical that strong security solutions are identified now.    

Dealing with these security issues is a challenge. Our company has been funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Air Force to address these issues, and after nearly four years of effort we are only now beginning to find the necessary solutions. Hopefully, our politicians will keep this in mind as they push for more automation of our critical infrastructure here in Connecticut and across the country.

 
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