[PLUG-TALK] P25 radios for Washington County

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Wed May 4 07:40:42 UTC 2016


Washington County has a $77M bond measure on the ballot for
upgrades to the 911 emergency communication system.

http://www.co.washington.or.us/boc/meetings/upload/cd-emergcommbond_proposal_v6b.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/wcp25

Budget on pages 13 through 16.

Some of the bond measure is for earthquake retrofit,
power, and microwave systems.  However, about half
of the measure is for P25 digital radios, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_25

The P25 standard is specified by Homeland Security, but
seems to be insecure, vulnerable, and half-baked; the WEP
of emergency communications.  The digital communication
may be better than the analog radios this will replace.
However, the encryption is hard to use, easy to jam, and
vulnerable to brute force attack, which will get easier
as computation gets cheaper and more efficient.  

P25 is already deployed around the US.  Three years ago,
I was at a computer conference with a presentation by a
New York City software radio hobbyist, who used a GNU
software radio to record the unencrypted P25 radio traffic
from a drug bust.  Since the encryption functions are so
difficult to use on the handsets the cops were using,
they dropped back to unencrypted mode.  The hobbyist 
recorded everything.  Soon, so will the bad guys.

I'm of two minds about this.  On the one hand, I don't
want Washington County spending big bucks on a vulnerable
system that might need to be replaced long before the
ballot measure is paid off.  On the other hand, secret
police suck, and ordinary citizens should be able to 
watch the watchers.

Among Intel's laid-off employees, there may be engineers
capable of evaluating this.  Preventing a very expensive
mistake by Washington County would look good on a resume.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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