The cover story of the June issue of InTech is on wireless. I didn’t see much new information in the article, perhaps with the exception of some survey numbers, but there were some bold statements.

“There are numbers of applications where wireless is cost effective and useful today,” said Wayne Manges, program manager of industrial wireless programs at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, managed by UT-Battelle and chairman of the ISA-SP100, Wireless Systems for Automation committee.

Nothing controversial there. Wireless communications eliminates the difficulties of running cables and potential noise issues. It is a very attractive technology.

“Right now the industries using wireless most are the ones that can not afford downtime, like refining, power generation, and even sewage treatment plants,” Manges said.

“Power generation (downtime) right now translates into dollars from the bottom line.” Sewage treatment plants can’t afford downtime because they are approaching capacity from increased development and population growth, he said.

Two points. The article is focused on wireless LAN technology for plants. This makes sense. A variety of wireless WAN technology has been used for years. It is the LAN technology that is new and the wireless LAN security protocols that have had the well publicized issues.

However, I’m not sure that industries that “can not afford downtime” should be the early adopters. Wouldn’t the security risks to integrity and availability most likely be unacceptable to a system that can never go down.

“Currently, there is commercial off-the-shelf technology that can make wireless as secure as wired,” Manges said. On top of that, he said, “there is technology on the horizon that can make wireless more secure than wired.”

Now this is a bold statement. I’m assuming he is talking about add-on VPN technology (similar to the technology for secure remote access from the Internet) that secures the communication between the endpoints and doesn’t rely on the security in the wireless protocols. Of course, this adds product and life cycle costs to the solution.

Even with that technology would a wireless VPN be as secure as wired? Could the wireless signal be disrupted or jammed without the physical access that would be required to snip a wire? Strictly speaking, isn’t a wireless signal easier to capture and analyze than a wired signal without physical access, even if the analysis is equally difficult. I suppose you could implement a spread spectrum technology such as direct sequence or frequency hopping and shield the building, but this is starting to get to be more costly than running cables.

A fair statement might be “the security risks to wireless can often be reduced to an acceptable level with off-the-shelf technology”, but a careful statement like that isn’t as interesting for publication.