AST Digital Magazine July/August 2016 | Page 68

Volume 6 everything is constantly moving – including the infrastructure – and can come and go as needed, allowing use in dynamic environments. At any given time, there can be thousands of possible routes through a Kinetic Mesh network with even just a handful of wireless nodes. In a Kinetic Mesh network environment, each node is connected to many nodes. Kinetic Mesh maintains huge numbers of simultaneous links to adjacent peers and the nodes constantly reevaluate what routes are the best paths for any given packet of information. If one route becomes unavailable for any reason – interference, loss of power, congestion – the next packet takes a faster route around the problem. Every node can make a fully independent decision, and it is not uncommon for a node to have several hundred peer connections, giving it the ability to use any link at any time. July-Aug 2016 Edition type of encryption secures the link between the device and access point, but then, away from the access point, information is decrypted and sent on its way. Kinetic Mesh offers the same type of encryption that wireless clients require for WiFi as well as end-toend encryption. When encrypted information flows through the mesh and comes out another node, it stays encrypted all the way through, and is not decrypted until it is delivered to its final destination, ensuring privacy. At each hop in the network, Kinetic Mesh provides a per-hop authentication for each packet, as well as secure authentication of message. This detects if data is tampered with while ensuring a packet of information received by a node came from a trusted peer. This protects from a type of cyber-attack called packet injection, when attackers try to “throw” packets into the network to disrupt traffic. Metadata encryption is another feature of Kinetic Mesh, and was implemented at the request of the military. Kinetic Mesh encrypts data so that as it flows through the network, an attacker cannot analyze the traffic and see which nodes are communicating with which other devices. Kinetic Mesh’s security features can benefit public safety and law enforcement in a municipality, especially in the realms of emergency operations and the capturing and processing of video. (Learn More, courtesy of Rajant Technology and YouTube) Kinetic Mesh, Security and Privacy In addition to being highly mobile and reliable, Kinetic Mesh allows a secure, private backbone to transmit whatever type of traffic – video, data, voice – a user requires, while also detecting tampering and supporting encryption of data security. When people think about wireless security, they often think about authentication and encryption between a client device (like a laptop or phone) and the access point or router the device talks to. That Marty Lamb, head of software engineering, Rajant Emergency Operations Facilitation 68