Wireless Communications Security

9 Monitoring and Protection Techniques

9.1 Overview

This chapter discusses techniques for the protection of mobile communications, services, users and applications. ‘Traditional’ solutions such as firewalls are important means for the isolation processes, as well as techniques based on the IPSec gateway. The role and principles of monitoring techniques as well as subscription modules are also discussed, including remote estimation of HW deterioration as part of the preparation for possible faults that may even expose security weaknesses. Real‐time network analysis and protection techniques are summarized such as deep packet investigation, virus protection and legal interception. Also a few words about location privacy and health‐related security of wireless systems are presented.

The number of mobile communications users is growing at a global level, and as data utilization increases, the MNOs are facing a constant need to adapt to or further cooperate with the ISPs. At the same time, in addition to the ‘traditional’ MNO role of providing voice calls and data service via a sufficiently well‐dimensioned bit pipe, the stakeholders have new challenges such as how to keep the performance and availability of the services sufficiently good, how to continue delivering new, rich and interesting user experiences and how to protect the networks, end‐user contents, devices and applications against known and future security threats. If the MNOs manage to tackle these challenges, ...