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GCN Home > 08/22/05 issue

Sandia labs demo ultrasecure wireless

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Encrypting low-power, ultrawideband transmissions could have many uses for government agencies.

Researchers at the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratories have demonstrated how to use a new wireless signal propagation technique called ultrawideband, or UWB, to convey secure information.

“We wanted to develop a super-secure wireless network,” said H. Timothy Cooley, senior scientific engineer at Sandia. The lab’s prototype system demonstrated how UWB could be suited for secured low-powered sensor networks. “The role of Sandia was to spearhead the development, [to] pull together the different pieces of that technology,” he said.

UWB promises to provide yet another format for transmitting data wirelessly. Born from work funded a decade ago by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, this type of signal has several attributes that set it apart from WiFi, land radio and the signal formats used by cellular phone carriers. It requires very little power and can operate in environments rife with radio frequency disturbances.

Although still emerging in the marketplace, UWB has a range of possible uses, said Jon Adams, president of the UWB Forum. The UWB Forum, an industry and academic coalition, chiefly markets UWB as a way to eliminate the cables that connect electronic devices, such as computers, printers, stereos and televisions. To this end, the Bluetooth development bodies are looking at ways to use UWB to carry signals. But it can also be used as the signal for radio frequency identification tags. Today’s UWB chip sets can produce a raw throughput from 100 Mbps to as much 2 Gbps, over distances as great as 100 meters.

Testing UWB for government
Vendors are in the early stages of designing and marketing UWB products, but Sandia wanted to see how the new propagation method could work for government agencies. The Air Force Electronic Systems Center sponsored the work. Chip set manufacturer Time Domain Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., provided its PulsOn chip set-based ultra-wideband radios for the project. Authentication tool provider KoolSpan Inc. of North Bethesda, Md., provided the test facilities and the SecurBridge encryption and decryption units.

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