Wireless Ubiquity

Excerpt From Introduction to Wireless Threat Intelligence Webinar Learn More About Wireless Ubiquity in the Brief Video Below CTO Dr. Brett Walkenhorst explains the proliferation of wireless devices globally, with tens of billions in existence and rapidly approaching a hundred billion. Just like visible light, but with the capacity to pass through stone and drywall, these devices generate wireless signals that are hard to confine or control. With the ubiquity of wireless devices, the need for increased knowledge and security on the wireless space continues to grow.

Key Takeaways

• There are tens of billions of wireless devices worldwide, rapidly approaching one hundred billion
• Mobile and IoT device counts continue to climb with no sign of leveling off
• The electromagnetic waves these devices emit cannot practically be contained
• Unlike visible light, radio-frequency signals pass through drywall and masonry, so walls are not a barrier

Video Transcript

Wireless devices are everywhere. To illustrate that briefly with that high level diagram of a network that's bigger than you think. But in general, there's tens of billions of these devices worldwide. There's a chart on the right hand side of this slide that indicates historical and projected trends of growth of mobile devices including cellular and IoT.

So this is not all wireless, but it's a big chunk of it. And you can see that it's growing continuously, and we are in the tens of billions. Rapidly approaching a hundred billion. So that's just crap ton of devices. So those numbers continue to go up. That's not changing.

And the wireless signals that they emit, likewise, are everywhere. And they're impossible to control and contain. So these devices use electromagnetic waves to communicate with each other. These waves just go. There's no way to stop them from from going except under there's certain extreme things you can do.

You can build faraday cages, which can be quite expensive. But other than that, these signals simply go and you can't really stop them They are similar in nature to visible light. I'll talk about that in a moment. They travel at the speed of light. But unlike visible light, they penetrate all kinds of objects.

Like drywall and masonry where physical light, those materials are opaque. At these frequencies, these electromagnetic waves tend to sail right through.