Re:The Backbone of VHF Amateur Radio May Be Under Threat
by tlrobinson on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @06:34PM
(#20340003)
A few points:
Encryption isn't typically part of the physical or data link layers, which are the bread and butter of amateur radio. What you send on top of those isn't really the interesting part of amateur radio, from a technical perspective.
The actual rule prohibits "messages encoded for the purpose of obscuring their meaning" which I think most people interpret to mean digital signatures for authentication and integrity are permitted, just not encrypted payloads.
Many protocols have the ability to switch ciphers, including disabling encryption entirely while still performing authentication and integrity checking.
It is, or will be, needed for experimentation. Wireless security cannot be an afterthought anymore; communication modes and protocols need to be built with security in mind from day 1.
There is one area where encryption is expressly permitted in amateur radio: satellite control, for obvious reasons. The future of amateur radio is not people talking to people over narrowband voice channels; it's going to be machines talking to other machines, and being able to control them. This is going to require encryption, or innovation will shift off the ham bands. And if the ARS is just ragchews, contesting, and doing things that have already been done instead of advancing communication, then there's not much defense when someone like Thales comes in and suggests reallocating bandwidth to something new and enterprising.