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It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general. This goes for everything from driving to manually deploying a rollback to y

by geofft 8y ago

It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general. This goes for everything from driving to manually deploying a rollback to your software to ham radio. If we really need encrypted communications in emergencies (and I buy that we do, tbh), we should be using encrypted communications for everyday conversations so we're comfortable with how to turn it on, what the failure modes are, how we handle authentication and key distribution, etc. And I mean everyday conversations, not just emergency practice events. See also this USENIX paper about how police with encrypted radios (who are legally allowed and generally expected to encrypt their traffic all the time) end up turning off encryption because it doesn't work reliably or easily: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec11/tech/full_papers/Clark.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec11/tech/full_papers/C... I have trouble believing that in a disaster, any significant portion of hams will manage to set up encryption.

jcims 8y ago
This is an important point and probably why even the US military doesn’t always elect to encrypt comms/control/telemetry. Encryption without proper key management is security theater, and proper key management is hard. Just rolling it out into an ecosystem that has never had to accommodate its idiosyncracies is a recipe for trouble...particularly when the cost of malfunction could be life and limb. HIPAA wasn’t designed for exceptional circumstances. Given the choice between letting a few radio nerds overhear that your kid was severely burned in a wildfire and needs immediate evacuation or letting them suffer longer b/c some certificate expired on a relay, most would choose the former. That said, if folks are willing to take the risk, you could potentially implement some kind of key escrow system so that comms are tactically protected but still subject to scrutiny. Lastly digital signatures employ cryptography, rules should be implemented in a way to still allow for that to occur.
Stratoscope 8y ago
> It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general. This is why you will hear the Hospital Net on the the N6NFI repeater every month. Here's the Net Control Operator script: https://www.scc-ares-races.org/hospital/docs/HospitalNetScript_v190121a.pdf https://www.scc-ares-races.org/hospital/docs/HospitalNetScri... If you listen to the net some night, you might hear operators checking in from each hospital saying "No traffic, we sent a packet." Which sounds pretty boring, but confirms two things: the ham radio station at that hospital has successfully completed a voice communication (obviously, because they are talking with Net Control), and they have also successfully sent a message to a designated packet radio address and had it confirmed. That's about as uninteresting as it gets, until the real emergency happens and everyone is glad you've been practicing this every month. It's also why, when you see a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/Baofeng/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Baofeng/ saying "I want to get one of these cheap handhelds for emergency communication, I know I'm not allowed to transmit unless it's a real emergency, but I can listen in the meantime and then I will have the radio on hand just in case," there will always be replies like "Get your Technician license! It's not that hard - many people study for half a day or less - and then you can practice transmitting on the ham bands, so you know you will be able to operate the radio."

by geofft 8y ago

jcims 8y ago

This is an important point and probably why even the US military doesn’t always elect to encrypt comms/control/telemetry. Encryption without proper key management is security theater, and proper key management is hard. Just rolling it out into an ecosystem that has never had to accommodate its idiosyncracies is a recipe for trouble...particularly when the cost of malfunction could be life and limb. HIPAA wasn’t designed for exceptional circumstances. Given the choice between letting a few radio nerds overhear that your kid was severely burned in a wildfire and needs immediate evacuation or letting them suffer longer b/c some certificate expired on a relay, most would choose the former. That said, if folks are willing to take the risk, you could potentially implement some kind of key escrow system so that comms are tactically protected but still subject to scrutiny. Lastly digital signatures employ cryptography, rules should be implemented in a way to still allow for that to occur.

Stratoscope 8y ago

> It's hard to use a system in an emergency if you're not used to using it in general. This is why you will hear the Hospital Net on the the N6NFI repeater every month. Here's the Net Control Operator script: https://www.scc-ares-races.org/hospital/docs/HospitalNetScript_v190121a.pdf https://www.scc-ares-races.org/hospital/docs/HospitalNetScri... If you listen to the net some night, you might hear operators checking in from each hospital saying "No traffic, we sent a packet." Which sounds pretty boring, but confirms two things: the ham radio station at that hospital has successfully completed a voice communication (obviously, because they are talking with Net Control), and they have also successfully sent a message to a designated packet radio address and had it confirmed. That's about as uninteresting as it gets, until the real emergency happens and everyone is glad you've been practicing this every month. It's also why, when you see a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/Baofeng/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Baofeng/ saying "I want to get one of these cheap handhelds for emergency communication, I know I'm not allowed to transmit unless it's a real emergency, but I can listen in the meantime and then I will have the radio on hand just in case," there will always be replies like "Get your Technician license! It's not that hard - many people study for half a day or less - and then you can practice transmitting on the ham bands, so you know you will be able to operate the radio."