RTC Magazine

With the great benefits that come from connecting to the Internet, users expose themselves to different and new kinds of risks. Information sent over the Internet must be protected to ensure that an individual’s or a company’s private information—whether financial or otherwise—will be safe from viewing and/or exploitation. Encryption is essential.

When a device is provided with Internet connectivity, it encounters this same level of risk as well. Suddenly, others can connect to it and gain the ability to use or misuse the device’s data or to otherwise sabotage the functionality of the overall system. Once again, protection is necessary. Just as a firewall is needed to protect your PC from unsolicited connection attempts, so developers must protect Internet-connected devices using firewall technology.

Wireless Connectivity – Different Solutions for Different Needs

Basic protection challenges become even greater when technology goes wireless. These days, wireless technologies seem to be everywhere, and M2M solutions are no exception. Most M2M solutions rely on one wireless technology or another.

Different M2M solutions require different wireless connectivity methods. For example, fleet management applications for trucks moving about the country must rely on cellular networks, while inventory management solutions used within the confines of a warehouse can use wireless LAN.

Cellular networks such as GSM/GPRS/UMTS provide ubiquitous coverage over large distances, usually at low data rates and with no encryption capabilities. For some applications and industries, sending unencrypted data (i.e., GPS coordinates of a truck’s location) does not represent a significant business risk. However, for some Internet-connected devices transferring sensitive information such as medical patient records or credit card payment information, this is a serious problem since data can potentially be intercepted en route to its destination. Data sent over cellular networks is usually charged according to volume, which can make transfer of significant amounts of data quite costly.

Short-range wireless networks such as wireless LAN cover a significantly smaller range but at much higher data rates, frequently with some level of encryption. Data sent over wireless LAN networks is free of charge. The low cost, ease of deployment and acceptable level of security makes Wi-Fi an ideal choice for short-range wireless applications. Some mobile RFID readers are equipped with wireless LAN in order to relay information read from RFID tags back to a central server over the Wi-Fi connection.

No matter what the M2M solution is, the need for a secure communications path is becoming increasingly important, and in some industries, mandatory.

Wireless Security – The Devil Is in the Details

The issue of security in wireless networks is often misunderstood by M2M end users. Cellular networks usually cannot offer any kind of wireless security. The data is sent from a device in an unencrypted manner over the cellular network. Connection attempts from the cellular network to the device are possible.

Wireless LAN offers a higher level of security. It has evolved over the last few years to become a widely accepted form of communications. The introduction of the WPA2 encryption algorithm has finally addressed the security concerns of even the most paranoid of users.

WPA2 achieves this increased security by using strong encryption and authentication based on dynamic encryption keys and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher as an alternative to the TKIP protocol. As such, it offers a superior level of security compared to its predecessor, the WEP protocol, which uses static keys and is no longer considered secure by many IT professionals. For many, a WPA2 security wireless LAN is now considered fully secure. However, even WPA2 may not be enough—not because it provides subpar encryption, but simply due to the fact that it is not able to encrypt data “end-to-end.”

Wireless security protocols such as WPA2 ensure a fully secure data communication path over the air, starting with the client device and ranging all the way to the access point. Security can be breached when any information leaves the boundaries of the wireless network.