New Technology Provides Powerful Security Protection for Wireless Communications

Applications

• Military and Commercial Significance:
• Although very convenient for users, wireless communication is extremelyvulnerable to eavesdropping. For example, hackers frequently access wireless computer networks (laptop computers linking to the network).
• Encrypting the data increases the security of these networks, but encryption is complex, inconvenient, time consuming for users, and adds a significant amount of overhead information that reduces data throughput.In frequency-hopping (spread-spectrum) networks now in wide use, users protect the data by sending it in brief spurts, with the transmitter and receiver skipping in a synchronized pattern among hundreds of frequencies. An intruder without knowledge of the synchronizationpattern would just hear static.
• A major vulnerability of many spread-spectrum networks involves compromising the network security by intercepting unprotectedinformation. Originators must send the sync pattern information to authorized receivers, often unprotected.
• The Gold algorithms support code-division multiple access, frequency-hopping multiple access, and ultra-wide-band spread-spectrumcommunication systems. They are designed for incorporation into enhanced versions of existing products, most of which already include circuitry that manufacturers can adapt to implement the technology.
• Dr. Gold developed a self-synchronizing and selective addressingalgorithm based on times-of-arrival (TOA) measurements of a frequency-hopping radio system. These algorithms allow a monitor to synchronize to a frequency-hopping radio in a network by making relatively brief observations of the TOAs on a single frequency.
• RGCS designed the algorithms for integration into spread-spectrum,frequency-hopping systems widely used for wireless communications such as wireless fidelity computer networks, cellular phones, and two-way radios used by the military, police, firefighters, ambulances, and commercial fleets.