Is wireless connectivity a reliability / DOS issue?

[SL4P]

With the me-too generation willfully creating 'wireless' connected gadgets and solutions.
Is this a serious threat to 'national security'?  No Joke!.

Using mobile devices, wireless security systems, WiFi, ZigBee, RFID and the like - we're becoming dependent on these systems being available for the majority of the time - for convenience and ease of access.
But this convenience exposes a huge white underbelly of weakness.

Virtually any RF infrastructure, on virtually any band - can be jammed, corrupted, disabled, or even damagedby targeted use of modified electronic appliances (read microwave ovens or other modified devices) with a bit of high-school physics knowledge.

The least impact will render the device offline for the duration of the attack, next - to drop offline until re-initialized, through to component damage to the RF components of the devices under attack, or domino effects propagating through power or data infrastructure in poorly designed solutions.

Wired projects are also vulnerable, but well established protocols are established for EMP/RF attacks on physical infrastructure...

I know this proposition isn't new, but certainly some standards and compliance should be expected in product distribution and installation for this area of business... ?

[Howardlong]

Possibly one of the worst from the point of view of its effects is GPS jamming. There are frequent GPS jamming tests run in the UK, and probably elsewhere. They show up in NOTAMs frequently.

Any infrastructure where there is no service level should be undestood from a technical risk perspective, and that includes the Internet. That is one reason why much enterprise comms still use point to point links in various guises. It's not just guaranteed bandwidth, latency and up time, it's also the contracted service level around that.

[SL4P]

Possibly one of the worst from the point of view of its effects is GPS jamming. There are frequent GPS jamming tests run in the UK, and probably elsewhere. They show up in NOTAMs frequently.

Any infrastructure where there is no service level should be undestood from a technical risk perspective, and that includes the Internet. That is one reason why much enterprise comms still use point to point links in various guises. It's not just guaranteed bandwidth, latency and up time, it's also the contracted service level around that.

And diverse routes.

[Howardlong]

Possibly one of the worst from the point of view of its effects is GPS jamming. There are frequent GPS jamming tests run in the UK, and probably elsewhere. They show up in NOTAMs frequently.

Any infrastructure where there is no service level should be undestood from a technical risk perspective, and that includes the Internet. That is one reason why much enterprise comms still use point to point links in various guises. It's not just guaranteed bandwidth, latency and up time, it's also the contracted service level around that.

And diverse routes.

...and using different providers using physically different cable routings, and avoidance of common mode failure by using a multi-vendor approach to infrastructure. Multi-site datacentres, minimum geographical distances, the list goes on. And it gets more and more expensive!

[SL4P]

With the me-too generation willfully creating 'wireless' connected gadgets and solutions.

Blah blah... uphill both ways... get off my lawn etc.
....Yeah, I'm not going to pay for a five 9's SLA on it, but 99% of the time it works fine and offers me valuable services.....

The original post was not suggesting that everyone needs 99.999% up-time, but to bring to the table the simple fact that a lot of uninformed consumers believe and expect wireless is reliable, secure, infrastructure grade technology when it comes out of the box from K-mart.

GPS mapping is faultless too right?

[Howardlong]

Not sure I'd like to be sitting on a commercial air transport while someone was doing GNSS jamming as commercial air transport is very dependent on the technology.

The silver lining is that in general it should be clear to crew that something is wrong, as it would be very difficult to spoof GNSS. Most likely it would simply result in degraded (or non-existent) position and altitude information.

Of concern, though, is that there is a concerted decommisioning of traditional nav aids like VOR and NDB, so backup to GNSS would be increasingly based on inertial systems and their cummulative errors, pitot systems, and magnetic and gyro compasses, in conjunction with radar vectoring. it would be a very busy day in the office for ATC in the event of loss of GNSS.