Wi-Fi 6

 

While the IEEE 802.11 standard defines the Wi-Fi standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance is an industry group that also helps to define these technologies. This group is responsible for the ‘Wi-Fi CERTIFIED’ program which ensures interoperability between devices regardless of their vendor. The internet of things (IoT) is becoming more prevalent in our everyday lives and within industrial settings, and this is driving the demand for more secure, efficient, and reliable connectivity methods. As customers ask for higher capacity and lower latency Wi-Fi, the community is pushing to adopt new capabilities and features to support these requests.

The next generation is called Wi-Fi 6, based on the 802.11ax standard, and it provides a variety of features such as ‘orthogonal frequency division multiple access’ (OFDMA) which improves performance in dense environments so devices can divide the spectrum allowing for a more consistent and deterministic network experience. For example, smaller packets can still be transmitted while larger packets for video streaming are unaffected.

‘Target wake time’ (TWT) is another feature of Wi-Fi 6 that allows connected devices to determine how frequently they should awake and transceive data. Basically, access points can now increase a device’s sleep time thus extending battery life and lowering consumption. This is imperative for smart and IoT devices which are required 24 hours a day, but don’t need to always be on.

Used in conjunction with the Wi-Fi Alliance’s ‘HaLow’, IoT devices remain power-efficient. HaLow provides long-distance, speed, low-power, penetration, and security features that other technologies do not. This technology supports higher throughput at ranges up to a kilometre while consuming a low amount of power and maintaining performance.

The alliance has also expanded their ‘CERTIFIED’ program to help optimise networks that are experiencing a rapid growth in the number and type of devices connecting to personal and corporate networks. For example, 1 certification is provided for those devices that improve mobility when roaming between networks. Other optimisations focus on QoS management or helping providers and network managers manage complex networks with more secure, efficient, and smart Wi-Fi networks.

In the most demanding wireless network environments, Wi-Fi 6 provides users the coverage, capacity, efficiency, and performance that is required as more devices are connected to our networks. The features of this next generation technology will only continue to grow in demand as out homes and offices become more connected through smart devices.

Leveraging Satellite Communications in Business

 

During last week’s Satellite 2022 conference, panellists discussed the possibilities for AI-powered satellite connectivity such as accelerating digital transformation, edge computing, and the enterprise IoT market. Satellite communications are intersecting with cloud services and other technologies which increase the data analytics and infrastructure possibilities in the future. For example, low orbit micro-satellites could provide a cost-efficient way to move data across the globe, and AWS are working with satellite developers to provide ground stations to downlink its growing data.

Through artificial intelligence and dynamic bandwidth allocation, satellite services may become more rapidly utilised by enterprises to increase their customer reach and accelerate their digital transformation. Nokia has started to provide consulting services in this sector and argues there are 3 pillars that organisations should focus on to enable this transformation. The first is obviously having a high-performance network layer via satellite, wireless, or wireline. The other 2 include analytics with AI and ML to analyse the factors that matter, and using digital devices to properly collect the data in the first place.

In order to digitise for transformation, everything must be digitised via an IoT sensing layer because collecting this data is useless if intelligence isn’t applied to it. In other applications, enterprises can connect to remote offices and locations using satellite technology. This is especially true for the mining, oil, and gas industries where locations may be quite disparate. Growth in IoT could significantly impact those industries wishing to harness the power of satellite communications by providing control and a visualisation of the enterprise’s operations.

The service should become more user-friendly as more data flows through these satellite networks, and the agriculture and healthcare sectors have also been seen as areas where this transformation could be highly beneficial. The use of AI will be critical to the success of IoT and thus the market for satellite communications moving forward.

We Are Experiencing More Sophisticated DDoS Attacks

 

Research by Nokia has found a large increase in botnet DDoS attacks over the last 2 years, with hackers utilising more sophisticated Internet of Things (IoT) botnets and amplifier attacks to exceed 10Tbps in capacity – this is over 3x the average size of attack previously found. These attacks have originated from cloud providers and regional internet providers all over the world as an international market for hackers and malicious actors has sprung up. The report highlights the importance of cybersecurity and attack mitigation for businesses and website owners.

Previously, DDoS attacks could be diverted using cleansing processes, but Nokia’s report found that an increased utilisation of IoT and cloud computing has considerably scaled up these attacks. Before, these attacks could be launched from home computers, but there is a growing black market of hacking and cyberattack tools that has increased the volume and scope of DDoS attacks possible. A plethora of offensive IT tools are for sale online and can be bought using cryptocurrency – remaining mostly untraceable to the initiated. IoT devices are known to have looser security protocols and provisions in place than other network-connected devices, and as more unsecured IoT devices are found in people’s homes, hackers are exploiting these devices to propagate new attacks and sell their toolkits online.

Of the 10,000 DDoS attacks Nokia analysed, they found the most poignant attacks were originating from high packet-rate, high bandwidth, volumetric DDoS attacks. These attacks are larger in scale and also much more difficult for security experts to identify and mitigate. Previous attacks were mitigated by identifying patterns and finding poorly randomised packet headers in the traffic. However, attackers are now using large-scale botnets with legitimate IP addresses and valid checksums which makes it much trickier for experts to separate the attackers from legitimate users.

It has been proposed that multiple layers of intricate security could be a work around for these new DDoS attacks. Typical strategies focus on reducing the attack surface area via CDNs or load balancers, and using firewall ACLs to mitigate the attacker’s traffic. Organisations can make themselves a harder target by using multipath VPNs to hide source-destination relationships and traffic patterns. Nokia itself does not provide any strategies for mitigating these new attacks, but puts the onus on organisations to enhance security processes and procedures and ensure they are effectively buffered from such attacks in future. The increasing rise of botnet DDoS attacks has been the result of more common and easily attainable tools and vectors of attack.