Portable And Quick To Deploy
Besides offering transmission path control and reliability, satellite communications also can be portable and quick to deploy, two reasons why they have been adopted for use by the U.S. military and TV journalists around the world.
The same advantages explain why satellite communications also are used by disaster relief agencies, especially because satellite services such as Inmarsat, Iridium and Globalstar provide near-global coverage. "With satellite communications, you can just jump in a truck and head to the scene knowing that you can get a signal out," says Rusch. This is not the case with terrestrial carriers. Their infrastructures often do not reach into remote areas and, if they do, are prone to failure during natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis.
Advanced Encryption Solutions Remain In Demand
As more users increase their need for advanced secure transmission portals, more developments for products services that provide reliable signal encryption via satellite are in high demand.
Maryland-based V-One Corp. specializes in providing secure end-to-end transmission solutions for government and business customers. One of its clients is the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which wanted to connect bomb disposal squads with the Bureau's Bomb Data Center in Washington, DC. The goal was to provide officers faced with the potentially lethal task of defusing bombs with up-to-date information and expert assistance, no matter where the incident was taking place.
Given the deployment and reach of satellite coverage, plus a mobile satellite truck's ability to go anywhere, satellite was the obvious transmission path for this project. But what about signal security, plus the time delays caused by sending data up to a satellite and back again? To meet both challenges, V-One supplied the necessary encryption software to the FBI and its proprietary Smartsat VPN (virtual private network) software.
"SmartSat deals with the latency problems of satellite transmission, which play havoc with conventional TCP/IP data transfers, by using a technique known as 'TCP spoofing'," says Margaret Greyson, V-One's president and CEO. "In a conventional TCP/IP network, the data sender requires confirmation that the first data packet has been received before it will send a second packet. Given the quarter-of-a-second time delay on a satellite network, this can slow traffic to a crawl. To prevent it, the TCP spoofer fools the data sender into elieving that the confirmation has been sent, so that the subsequent data packets flow without interruption."
Netherlands-based Irdeto Access and United Kingdom-based NDS both provide conditional access software to the pay-per-view TV (PPV) industry. Both companies' software is vital to the health of the PPV industry on satellite and cable TV.
"Our products enable the PPV operator to receive the revenue they are entitled to, by ensuring that only paying, authorized customers can decrypt the incoming PPV signal," says Bo Ferm, Irdeto Access' regional manager for the Americas. "To deter pirates, our software can be set to change the required encryption key every ten seconds. This means that even if a person could somehow figure out which 64- or 128-bit key is being used to encode the video, their success would be extremely short-lived."
The Bottom Line
When it comes to secure signal transmission, satellite can play a strategic role for delivering data for both business and government users. The "proof of this pudding," to quote Hartshorn, is the number of military and Fortune 500 clients who rely on encrypted satellite transmission each and every day for their mission-critical communications. Satellite's portability, fast deployment and ability to go where terrestrial network cannot make this delivery mechanism a strategic choice.
System administrators in charge of disseminating content through corporate networks must keep security as one of the most important elements in the transmission regardless of what the content relays. As business arenas become more competitive, content more proprietary and corporate networks more complex, securing information through a reliable system becomes crucial. For any client, be it commercial or government, tasked with the responsibility of keeping information securely flowing from Point A to Point B, implementing satellite-enabled encryption network can very well become one of the strongest defenses in avoiding leaked or lost information, downed systems and non-encrypted content falling before the eyes of those not meant to see it.
James Careless is senior contributing writer to Via Satellite Magazine.
Email
Comments
Print
Reuse
