BrandPost: Improving the Security of Radio Frequency Emitting Devices on the Network
By Dolan Sullivan, Vice President of Federal at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.
Federal and non-governmental IT teams have long been aware of the risk of radio frequency (RF) network blindness. Afterall, unauthorized communications in a secure zone can reveal personnel movements and create a conduit for data exfiltration, such as how a fitness tracker can inadvertently revealed the physical movements of military personnel.
The need for RF situational awareness has intensified as the use of mobile and IoT devices have exploded across both governments and private organizations that support those governments. These challenges are compounded by the fact that most of the devices use many or multiple different radio frequency technologies, such as Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Most pressingly, high security Federal agencies have had to rely on the honor policy and reporting policy to limit the entry of RF-emitting devices without the ability to effectively track and manage them on the network.