[EAS] Next Generation

[Dale Lamm]

One delivery comment then a statement supporting Phil Johnson's position....

SiriusXM (last I checked) had a free to air barker channel. I understand they are EAS participants. A SiriusXM receiver costs a few dollars. Although a black hat could overwhelm the S-band downlink from SiriusXM with a jammer (affecting just a few receiving locations), it would be a challenge to spoof the SiriusXM downlink and inject a false alert. How difficult would it be to spoof one of your current-day VHF monitoring assignments? IMO, SiriusXM could be a parallel to PEP without much work.

Phil makes a good point about reaching out to wiser ones in order to implement better message security. The electronic red envelope is a great idea, assuming the authenticator word is lengthy enough to require many, many trials for a black hat to guess the correct one. AND if the delivery of the locally stored authenticator word occurs over a secure channel. Making it the payload of an RWT received from an off-air source is not necessarily secure.

The problem of secure, authenticity-guaranteed message delivery over wireless has been around since World War I. Many brilliant minds have made this their life's work.

Here's an idea that builds on the electronic red envelope...

The old, printed authenticator words were designed to make you feel confident that a message containing the correct word of the day was genuine. We just need to load a similar list of authenticators into our EAS boxes, so they can be compared against authenticators embedded in national alerts received from outside sources. Load the local list weekly from some component of an off-air RWT? No, that message is delivered by insecure means. Load by hand once a month using the web interface? No, that involves many humans. Humans can be bribed. Load via the EAS box's internet connection on a semi-frequent basis? Hmmm... isn't there already something in the CAP message protocol that assures authenticity? This is mentioned in FEMA documents, but details are scant.

Greater minds no doubt can figure out a way to deliver future authenticator words (or "keys" if you will) as a special CAP message from FEMA (possibly encrypted... the CAP documentation I can see says nothing about bulk encryption, only authenticity). The EAS box would hold these and use them to cross check any important alert from an insecure channel before acting upon it.

[snip]

I concur with the movement toward alternative distribution, especially via
satellite.  Authentication solutions (rejection of unauthorized ground
transmissions) are routine in the 21st century.  This method would eliminate
a lot of complexity, expense, and delay.

[snip]

I sympathize with the aversion to involving another federal agency and the
inherent delay, and I know NSA has been publicly beaten up lately.  But
let's get real.  Although there are lots of smart people in this forum, none
of us has the expertise and experience in COMSEC to implement the quality of
solution that NSA could bring to the table.

[end]