Presented By:
Willam (Bill) O’Brien,
Systems Solution Architect,
Corporate Security,
Bell Canada
As systems solution architect for Bell Canada, O’Brien is responsible for ensuring that any data that hits the Bell network is secure, regardless of the mobile device used. To deal with this challenge, O’Brien has a toolbox of security mechanisms that includes ECC and AES.
During his talk, O’Brien used several case studies to illustrate the importance of ECC’s speed, flexibility and efficiency in mobile communications. In one of the scenarios, he discussed the challenge of maintaining secure connectivity with moving law enforcement cruisers. O’Brien and team created a datagram connection between a police cruiser and a tower using 1X-RTT. He used ECC-based certificates to authenticate sessions and ECC-public/private keys to encrypt the data. By rotating keys during a session he prevents encrypted data from being broken and there is no need to re-establish a connection should he lose a signal. The transmission resumes from where it left off.
In each of his scenarios, which ranged from securing connections for moving vehicles to controlling the back door of an IP network and regulating access points in the Bell stores, O’Brien explained why ECC is vital to his security policies.
This issue of Code & Cipher reviews the first annual Certicom ECC Conference and summarizes some of the key discussions at the event.