Security demands fuel market for encrypted communications.

LONDON -- The rapid expansion of Internet-based communications for military command functions and other security-sensitive operations has sparked concerns about protecting that data from intruders.

The military for years has used exclusive portions of the radio spectrum for communications. Moreover, their systems have had security hardware embedded in them to make interceptions difficult. As a result, secure channels were almost always guaranteed.

But the circumstances are changing as the demands for communications grow, mostly driven by soaring requirements for video and data transmissions.

Companies that can deliver secure high-data rate communications will be taking the lead in the market, says Herve Guillou, president and CEO of defense communications systems at EADS Defense Security Systems Ltd.

In September, he signed a partnership agreement with Cisco Systems Inc.--a supplier of networking technologies--to tackle the challenge of secure military communications. The two companies hope that their expertise in secure voice and video communications and tactical encryption can help them boost their military sales.

The defense and public safety sectors are adopting commercial technology in video, security and global ad-hoc networking, says Brad Boston, senior vice president of global government solutions at Cisco. His company is attempting to improve the real-time connectivity of voice communications.

"The one-size-fits-all model for security and encryption will change," he says. People are realizing that battlefield data is susceptible to threats in the commercial world and that it needs a different method of security. There will be an evolution in several years with some different levels of security applied to various technologies, he says.

The task is made more difficult by the military's desire to become more mobile, and its requirement that communications systems function on the move.

"The whole network-centric infrastructure has to be mobile," says Chris Dedicoat, president of Cisco's European business. "That's where this complexity has become such a challenge."

Sending secure information quickly to destinations far from the point of origin will become the norm in the near future.

"We expect that we'll need the ability to take video to any device, whether it is air, land or sea," says Dedicoat.

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Cisco has introduced a Linux-based encryption technology that provides added security over a number of networks, says Boston. "Information terrorism is becoming more and more sophisticated," says Dedicoat. There are trends that can be spotted in networks, and if threats are found, they need to be automatically isolated and "incubated" to give customers time to suppress the problem, he says.

"We need to be able to shut down radio spectrum. We need to be able to shut down data points, voice points, video modules," says Dedicoat.

For example, when police in June discovered two cars rigged with explosives in London, U.K. authorities allegedly shut down portions of the Global System for Mobile communications network, on which cell phones operate in Europe.

"There were no networks for four hours," says Guillou. Calls had been made to cell phones found inside the bomb-laden vehicles, and authorities believe they failed to trigger the explosions. Disabling the cell phone network may have prevented the terrorists from communicating while also thwarting other potential bomb detonations using cell phone frequencies.