Communication System Security

Helping current and future system designers take a more productive approach in the field, this text shows how to apply security principles to state-of-the-art communication systems. The authors use previous design failures and security flaws to explain common pitfalls in security design. The book includes many examples, figures, exercises, and projects and provides PowerPoint slides and other ancillaries on the author’s website. A solutions manual is available with qualifying course adoption.

Helping current and future system designers take a more productive approach in the field, Communication System Security shows how to apply security principles to state-of-the-art communication systems. The authors use previous design failures and security flaws to explain common pitfalls in security design.

Divided into four parts, the book begins with the necessary background on practical cryptography primitives. This part describes pseudorandom sequence generators, stream and block ciphers, hash functions, and public-key cryptographic algorithms.

The second part covers security infrastructure support and the main subroutine designs for establishing protected communications. The authors illustrate design principles through network security protocols, including transport layer security (TLS), Internet security protocols (IPsec), the secure shell (SSH), and cellular solutions.

Taking an evolutionary approach to security in today’s telecommunication networks, the third part discusses general access authentication protocols, the protocols used for UMTS/LTE, the protocols specified in IETF, and the wireless-specific protection mechanisms for the air link of UMTS/LTE and IEEE 802.11. It also covers key establishment and authentication in broadcast and multicast scenarios.

Moving on to system security, the last part introduces the principles and practice of a trusted platform for communication devices. The authors detail physical-layer security as well as spread-spectrum techniques for anti-jamming attacks.

With much of the material used by the authors in their courses and drawn from their industry experiences, this book is appropriate for a wide audience, from engineering, computer science, and mathematics students to engineers, designers, and computer scientists. Illustrating security principles with existing protocols, the text helps readers understand the principles and practice of security analysis.