TAC to Help FCC Figure Out What Role It Should Play on Cybersecurity

"I don’t think you can overstate the importance” of cybersecurity, said Paul Steinberg, chairman of TAC’s Cybersecurity Working Group and Motorola Solutions chief technology officer. Other agencies including the FTC are already sharply focused on the area as well, he said. “The tricky part will be ... to sort out what’s the best role for the FCC and how can they amplify those activities or collaborate in a productive way to further advance the cause."

Steinberg said he has just started working with the FCC to figure out what questions TAC should ask. “FCC is thinking here how can they foster collaboration, how can they get in front of the challenges ... by working with industry,” he said. “Unfortunately, what we see in the papers and what we know of is primarily a reactive kind of thing. The question is how can we intrinsically make hardware, software products less susceptible to cyberattack.”

Industry is already “heavily focused” on cybersecurity, Steinberg said. “Traditionally, I would say years ago, it was ‘do as little as you can ... get away with in order to get your product to market,'” he said. “That has changed quite a lot. The stakes are much, much higher now.” From the perspective of Motorola Solutions, “not a lot of coercion is required” to force industry cooperation, he said. “The stakes are just far too high. The threats are just too complex.”

"The focus in this area has just changed with a new player, a new chief for the Public Safety Bureau,” noted TAC Chairman Dennis Roberson, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “The number of threats from a cyber standpoint just keeps growing.” Last year, Wheeler hired David Simpson, a cybersecurity expert, as new bureau chief, and Simpson has since made clear he has refocused the bureau on cybersecurity issues(CD Feb 19 p1). A retired Navy rear admiral, Simpson was vice director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, where he took on cyberthreats facing the Department of Defense.

A second TAC working group is looking at the Internet of Things (IoT) and the demands it will make on existing networks. “We'll start off with sort of the big picture of why IoT, what are the social and economic benefits,” said working group Chairman Russ Gyurek, leader of Cisco’s Global Technology Team. “We'll look at the data growth, the number of devices. What that impact will be. Today, many people look at IoT as very small amounts of data, but small amounts of data times 50 billion adds up to lots of data.”

The working group will also look at IoT security, spoofing and device vulnerability, Gyurek said. “Those will just be more and more in the press over the next couple of years as people learn to hack into IoT devices.” Focuses will include privacy issues and the demands that will be placed on spectrum, he said. As with cybersecurity, the working group will also look at what other agencies like the FTC are already doing on IoT. “We don’t want to duplicate what they're doing, but we also want to leverage that,” he said.

TAC member John Chapin of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency noted that finding a “slice” for the FCC is complicated. An alert light or a temperature sensor is the same kind of hardware, he said. “But if I plug it into the public Internet, it’s an FCC concern,” he said. “If I plug it into a medical body-area network, because it’s inside me, it’s [a Food and Drug Administration] concern. If it’s in an aircraft, it’s [a Federal Aviation Administration] concern.”

FCC Office of Engineering and Technology Chief Julius Knapp said TAC should focus on issues that are “forward-looking, but not too far out that they're not directly relevant to the things that we're facing today.” All of the issues TAC will tackle are difficult, he said. He asked TAC to make “actionable” recommendations and prioritize them as well. “We often have terrific ideas, but when you come with 15 things out of each group, that’s not really manageable,” Knapp said. “We have several big issues here. We have no expectation we're going to solve everything out of this process."

A third big focus of TAC this year will be on receiver standards, said Lynn Claudy, senior vice president at NAB and chairwoman of the Receiver Performance Working Group. Claudy said the group in part will focus on enforcement and on development of a multistakeholder group to oversee industry cooperation on interference, starting with the 3.5 GHz band, which the FCC has targeted for shared use.

Knapp said the FCC plans to release a further NPRM soon on receiver performance based in part of recommendations from TAC. “Our thought was we'd have recommendations coming out of this for the charter and how the group would work and so forth and then try to get it up and running,” he said. “Our thought was” the 3.5 GHz band “would be a good place” to examine receiver performance issues, he said. Technical issues include “what are reasonable expectations in designing equipment that you should have for performance,” he said.

The group has already released its first white paper of the year (http://bit.ly/N1nUs9), with more to come, Claudy said. The paper focuses on “harm claim thresholds” as a tool for assessing interference risks. “Increased density of wireless systems requires increased regulatory attention to the optimization of the interactions between transmitters and receivers on either side of band boundaries,” the paper said. “Increased signal strength from transmitters may provide improved reception and/or coverage, but requires receivers in adjacent spectrum to be able to reject unwanted signals outside their allocated frequencies -- and such interference tolerance comes at a cost.” Harm claim thresholds can “provide added clarity about the rights and responsibilities of radio service operators regarding harmful interference,” the paper said. “This will be particularly useful in, and at the boundaries of, bands with many diverse and frequently emerging new device types.”

Other TAC working groups will focus on spectrum sharing and the IP transition. The IP transition was a major focus when Wheeler chaired TAC, noted Nomi Bergman, president of Bright House Networks and chairwoman of that working group. “We came to the conclusion that we should accelerate the transition” of the public switched telephone network, she said. “Now we are here to finish that job. So that’s what this working group is going to do. ... Admittedly, this is a very delicate subject. We want to evolve while meeting still what the commission has defined as mandatory conditions, things like 911 functioning or continued access for persons with disabilities.” The IP transition is already happening across the world, Bergman said. “We don’t want to be left behind.”