Wireless Invisibility

Excerpt From Introduction to Wireless Threat Intelligence Webinar CTO Dr. Brett Walkenhorst Elaborates on Wireless Invisibility Visible light has an enormous range of frequencies that are observable beyond the small portion of the spectrum that humans can see. Radio waves are related to lower frequencies and include many types of wireless technologies. Since these signals are undetectable to humans, detection, demodulation, decoding, and analysis need specialized equipment. Watch the video below to hear CTO Dr. Brett Walkenhorst explains more.

Key Takeaways

• Humans see only a narrow visible slice of the electromagnetic spectrum
• Radio waves, where wireless protocols live, sit below visible light and are completely invisible to us
• Seeing wireless activity requires special instrumentation to detect, demodulate, and decode signals
• Important data flies around invisibly at the speed of light, which is why RF visibility matters

Video Transcript

So the devices and their signals are everywhere. All around us all the time and we cannot see them. So we can see a narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call the visible spectrum. And that visible light is represented in the figure on the upper right of this slide.

You see the spectrum with small wavelengths on the left and large wavelengths on the right. If you're like me and you think of frequencies, low frequencies are on the right, high frequencies are on the left. And then there's this little tiny slice in the middle. Where humans are attuned to sense the electromagnetic radiation, we can see that visible light and it's represented as a color scheme to us.

At lower frequencies, we have infrared, radio waves, upper frequencies, we have ultraviolet x rays, gamma rays. We don't see any of that. We we can't see it. It's invisible. And so all of the stuff that we're talking about today, all the wireless protocols that live at those lower frequency ranges that we call radio waves.

We don't see that. It's all around us and to bring visibility to that invisible stuff, require special instrumentation. So we have electronic systems that allow us to detect, demodulate, decode, disinformation, And that's really critical because there's important ones and zeros flying around invisibly at the speed of light all around us all the time.