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Year of humanitarian engineering
by Peter Hitchiner
 It
is perhaps fitting at the outset of 2011 that, apart from wishing all
College members all the best for 2011, I reflect on the opportunity for
ITEE College members to participate in activities and initiatives in
this Year of Humanitarian Engineering.
Several of our members
have set a great example with the initiative of providing critical
support to mobile phone and internet users in Brisbane in the immediate
aftermath of the floods.
The importance of robust, in
particular wireless, telecommunications and data centre (including
disaster recovery) infrastructure in the wake of floods, cyclones and
other catastrophic failure situations has become very apparent.
The
development and resilience of such infrastructure will be of increasing
importance in all countries and, with the continual growth in the
electronic services and associated digital economies, there will be an
increasing role for ITE/ICT engineers.
This will include
support for developing economies in such matters as eHealth,
eEducation, financial services (eg. micro-financing), and access to
spatial information to support new (electronic) services and smart
solutions. The need for more people skilled in these areas throughout
the community will become a growing challenge if the opportunities are
not to be inhibited. These needs also exist in many parts of Australian
society.
So, here is a challenge to all ITEE College members
to create and contribute to various EA initiatives in this Year of
Humanitarian Engineering.
I also take this opportunity to
encourage ITEE College members to contribute to the issues currently
subject to EA policy development in urban policy, population strategies
and sustainability.
The potential contribution of the ITE/ICT
industries to enabling sustainability in the face of urban development
and population growth is enormous and essential here and overseas!
This column also appears in the ITEE College Board Chair blog: please post your feedback.
Peter Hitchiner is the ITEE College Chair 2011
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Temporary closure of Egypt’s internet
On
28 January, in response to protests and riots, the Egyptian government
took unexpected action against its 80 million citizens. It cut off its
internet routes to the rest of the world.
Shortly after midnight
Cairo time, the Egyptian government ordered internet service providers
to stop announcing almost all of their BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
routes to the rest of the world. These effectively let other routers
know of the possible routes that can be taken to reach their networks.
Mobile
network operators were also ordered to shut down their services.
Vodafone was one of the service providers that provided comment on the
order to shutdown its route announcements. On its website (now
removed), it said, “All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed
to suspend services in selected areas. Under Egyptian legislation the
authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to
comply with it.”
In a later statement, the company said there
are “no legal or practical options open to Vodafone, or any of the
mobile operators in Egypt, but to comply with the demands of the
authorities.”
Physical links to Egypt were intact, with European-Asian traffic continuing to route via fibre links in Egypt.
Initially,
one exception to the BGP blackout was service provider Noor Group.
While it is unknown as to why the service provider continued to
announce its routes (or if it was ordered not to), speculation existed
that it was due to its routes to several financial services such as the
Egyptian Credit Bureau and Egyptian Stock Exchange (ESE).
On 1 February, Noor stopped announcing its routes.
Those
cut off from the rest of the world had to find alternate ways to
connect to the internet. As landline phone access was still available,
many made use of dial-up accounts to establish outbound connections.
BGP routes were restored on 2 February, with Noor reannouncing its routes a few hours later than other providers.
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University website defaced, records compromised
The
website of the University of Sydney was defaced last month and a
vulnerability was discovered that could be used to read student records.
In
a message left on the defaced site, a hacker going by the name of Evil
ridiculed the existing network administrator. Evil pointed out that the
web server’s logs showed three previous intrusions and no action had
been taken to secure it.
While the damage from defacing websites
is usually limited to the web server hosting the site, Evil also
claimed to have access to three quarters of the rest of the
administrator’s network.
For several days after the defacing of the site, the main site displayed that it was undergoing maintenance.
Following
the attack, University of Sydney vice-chancellor and principal Michael
Spence initially sent out an email to all students of the university
which stated that “much of the University’s website remained untouched
and no systems were compromised” and that “no student or financial
records were impaired.”
In an article by the Sydney Morning Herald,
an anonymous security expert was able to demonstrate access to the
records of past and present students. According to the article, leaked
details included financial records, names and addresses. It also stated
that the university was alerted of the vulnerability in 2007.
It is not clear whether the defacing of the site is related to the security flaw that allowed access to student records.
Shortly
after the article was published, Spence sent out another email
confirming the existence of the flaw, and that they were previously
aware of it.
“The University was advised of such a flaw in our
security in 2007. At that time the matter was swiftly rectified as it
has been today. Regrettably, some time later as a result of a software
update, the security patch was inadvertently removed without anyone
becoming aware of its function in protecting the security of student
records.”
His email also states that student records “could only be viewed and could not in that way have been changed”.
In
addition to securing student records and its web server, the university
has engaged two web security organisations to investigate the attack.
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Contracts for the NBN
The
National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co) is continuing to make
progress on the network with the award of a number of equipment
contracts and the selection of a data centre in Queensland.
Victorian
fibre optic equipment manufacturer Warren & Brown Technologies has
been awarded an equipment contract worth up to $110 million over five
years. The company, which has built a research, development and
manufacturing facility in Maidstone, north-west Melbourne, will provide
optical distribution frames and sub-racks. These products require
sheetmetal manufacture and assembly of fibre optic connectors.
NBN
Co has also awarded a contract for multiple types of equipment worth up
to $1.2 billion over five years to Corning, a manufacturer of fibre
optic cabling. Corning’s existing manufacturing facility in Clayton,
Melbourne, has already supplied fibre optic cable and other equipment
to help build NBN Co’s first release sites.
Corning will be
the initial supplier of aerial cable, provide selected types of splice
closures and will jointly supply feeder cables and drop cables which
will connect individual user premises to the fibre network.
NBN
Co awarded a third equipment contract worth $300 million over five
years to Prysmian, a global manufacturer of telecommunications cabling
with manufacturing facilities in Dee Why and Liverpool, Sydney. It is
being contracted to provide underground cabling for the NBN project.
NBN Co has also contracted Polaris Data Centre in Queensland to host its second data centre.
The
data centre will house NBN Co’s IT infrastructure and its operational
and business support systems. The value of the contract is
approximately $5 million over five years.
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Extinguishing Firesheep through SSL
Organisations
have begun to provide end-to-end encryption by default in response to
session hijacking or “sidejacking”, with Facebook and Hotmail among the
first to enable users to use SSL (Secure Socket Layer) across their
entire session.
While the use of sidejacking is not a recent
development, it has received more attention after the release of
Firesheep, a sidejacking tool which made it easy for the average user
to hijack other users’ sessions over open networks.
Most
organisations are taking an opt-in approach, where users must enable
SSL for it to be used across their entire logged-in session, as opposed
to just during the log-in period.
Facebook has stated it hopes to offer end-to-end encryption as a default
some time in the future, but until then users must manually activate it
in their account settings. This means that those who are not as
technically literate (and are generally those most at risk) will be
less likely to find and activate the option.
Other sites have
not adopted the use of SSL. One example is Twitter. Although it sends
login requests to an https:// address, it is vulnerable to code
injection. Such man-in-the-middle attacks occurred during the Tunisian
protests when passwords for Twitter and Facebook accounts were stolen
(Facebook temporarily solved the issue by forcing all Tunisian traffic
to use SSL).
Furthermore, once logged in, sessions are not
encrypted unless users explicitly force their browser to Twitter’s
https:// address.
To ensure that all requests go via SSL (where sites support it), the Electronic Frontier Foundation in collaboration with the Tor Project have developed a Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere.
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Stuxnet virus dossier updated
Computer
security research firm Symantec has updated its dossier on Stuxnet
after gathering more information on the worm. The new version of the
dossier provides further infection statistics, outlines the behaviour
of infected PLCs in further detail, and discusses other variants of
Stuxnet.
Stuxnet targets specific industrial control systems.
While the targeted organisation of Stuxnet is unknown, about 12,000
infections can be traced back to five organisations, each of which have
a presence in Iran. Symantec have stated that the target is likely to
be a gas pipeline or power plant.
Further speculation exists
that the intended targets are the centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz uranium
enrichment plant. Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad confirmed late
last year that those centrifuges were experiencing problems due to
installed software, although he did not specifically name Stuxnet as
the cause.
Stuxnet attempts to sabotage specific frequency
converter drives that normally operate between 807Hz and 1210Hz. It
modifies the output of the frequency drives to 1410Hz, 2Hz and 1064Hz
for short periods. It also provides false information to the safety,
warning and monitoring systems for these drives to disguise its actions.
It
employs the use of four zero-day vulnerabilities, can spread over local
area networks or via USB drives, can update itself remotely, and
previously used a compromised signed driver certificate to aid
infection.
The complete dossier is available on the Symantec website. |
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NBN corporate plan reviewed
The
National Broadband Network Company’s (NBN Co) corporate plan has been
completed to high professional standards, according to independent
corporate advisory firm Greenhill Caliburn.
Greenhill Caliburn
was asked to review NBN Co’s corporate plan and provide a commercial
assessment, identifying and analysing the plan’s key assumptions and
potential risks.
While the Australian government has only
released the executive summary of the report to the public, due to
concerns that the complete document would reveal sensitive,
commercial-in-confidence material.
The executive summary of the
report concluded that the plan provides, “the level of detail and
analytical framework that would be expected from a large listed public
entity evaluating an investment opportunity of scale”, and that, “the
corporate plan for the development of the NBN is reasonable”.
The
full report provides an overview of NBN Co, a preliminary commercial
assessment of the corporate plan including assumptions and potential
risks, and a summary of potential performance management strategies.
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Smartphone developer opens windows
Finnish
communications corporation Nokia has surprised the mobile phone
industry by announcing it will use Microsoft Windows Phone 7 as its
primary operating system.
The company had been working with
Intel on MeeGo, a Linux-based open-source mobile operating system. Its
existing Symbian operating system has recently received criticism for
its inability to keep pace with the rest of the market, falling behind
Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms.
According to
Canalys, Google has taken market leadership, holding 32.9% of the
global market share, up 24.2 percentage points from last year. Nokia
fell 13.8 percentage points to 30.6%. Apple experienced a small
decrease of 0.3 percentage points to 16%. Microsoft holds just 3.1% of
the market share, down 4.1 percentage points.
Nokia had refused
to consider Android for its future operating system under concerns that
there would be long-term problems if used.
Nokia will continue to develop MeeGo in conjunction with Intel, but as a secondary, optional operating system.
Global smartphone market share for Q4 2010
Credit: Eraserhead1
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The internet runs out of addresses
The
last pool of IPv4 internet addresses have been allocated, to five
global Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), signalling the depletion of
the 4.3 billion addresses available and the need for IPv6 for future
addressing needs.
Two “blocks” of the dwindling number of IPv4
addresses, about 33 million of them, were allocated to the RIR for the
Asia Pacific region. When that happened, it meant the pool of IPv4
addresses had been depleted to a point where a global policy was
triggered to immediately allocate the remaining small pool of addresses
equally among the five global RIRs.
The allocation of the
final IPv4 addresses is analogous to the last crates of a product
leaving a manufacturer and going to a regional store or distribution
centre. They can still be distributed to the public, but, once they are
gone, the supply is exhausted.
“It’s only a matter of time
before the RIRs and internet service providers must start denying
requests for IPv4 address space,” said Raúl Echeberría, chair of the
Number Resource Organisation, the umbrella organization of the five
RIRs. “Deploying IPv6 is now a requirement, not an option.”
IPv6 has many design improvements over IPv4, most notably the use of 128-bit addressing as opposed to IPv4’s 32-bit addressing.
The theoretical maximum number of addresses under IPv6 is about 3.4 x 1038, as opposed to IPv4’s 4.3 x 109. Only about one eighth of the addresses are expected to be used.
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Australia ill prepared for cyber war
Australians
are grossly underestimating the threat of cyber warfare and the
Australian government is not doing enough to keep up with the growth
rate of threats, according to the Kokoda Foundation.
The independent research think-tank this month released a paper, titled Optimising Australia’s Response to the Cyber Challenge,
which sought to answer the question of whether Australia is doing
enough to address growing threats in the cyber environment and if not,
what needs to be done.
While the report applauds the intent
behind the government’s Cyber Security Strategy, it notes that the
strategy is “not keeping pace with the growing threat and as a result
is placing the collective and individual security of the nation’s
people at risk.”
The report criticises the current strategy’s
horizon of only a few years, stating that while the actions taken to
date are excellent, it lacks long-term planning and goal setting.
Instead, the report recommends a whole-of-nation, government-led,
long-term National Cyber Strategy and Plan, which could be developed as
a subset of the existing National Security Strategy.
Development
of the National Cyber Strategy and Plan would define the government’s
roles and responsibilities, identify priorities and ensure the
necessary resources are dedicated towards mitigating cyber threats.
The report also recommended the appointment of a minister for cyber issues, together with a ministerial committee.
With
regards to research and development in the cyber environment, the
report identified a number of initiatives to improve cyber education
such as a virtual cyber academy (formed by linking universities and
relevant educational institutions), a cyber range, and a cyber
cooperative research centre.
A full copy of the report will be available to download from their website in March.
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Managing fibre
Belden has introduced FiberExpress@EASE: a new standard in fibre patch panel solutions for quicker and easier fibre management
Connectivity and networking products manufacturer Belden has added a new fibre patch panel to its FiberExpress family.
Each
SC and LC FiberExpress@EASE unit incorporates a coupler management bar
that enables the coupler to sit flush on the front face of the panel.
This creates a greater bend radius and a better fit for patch cords
within a standard rack.
www.beldenapac.com
The FiberExpress@EASE panel provides improved fibre management.
Visual programmable logic controller
Micromax
Sensors & Automation has released the Unitronics Vision560 OPLC. It
combines 1024 I/O options with data logging and built-in recipe
capability, while maintaining minimum wiring and reduced programming
time.
The Vision560 is capable of 24 auto-tuned PID loops to
control temperature, level, and pressure, while the 320x240 resolution
colour touch screen displays data, colour trend graphs, and alarm
screens.
The memory holds 2MB of application logic, plus 1MB for
fonts and 6MB for images. Features include SD card memory storage for
log, backup, and clone. The controller scans 1K of a typical
application in 9µsec, making it an ideal solution for rapid-response
applications such as packaging machines.
Communication options
include TCP/IP Ethernet, cellular, and industrial protocols such as
MODBUS and CANopen. In addition, the Vision560 can be taught to
communicate via almost any device-based protocol.
The Vision560
supports high-speed, digital, and analog I/Os, plus direct temperature
measurement inputs via snap-in I/O. Unitronics’ complimentary VisiLogic
software provides one user-friendly environment for hardware
configuration, modular Ladder application development, and HMI design –
including a rich color library of industrial images.
www.micromaxsa.com.au
The Vision560 is ideal for rapid-response applications.
New power transistor
Freescale
Semiconductor has introduced a 50V LDMOS power transistor that can
deliver its full rated output power of 1.25kW after withstanding a load
mismatch VSWR of 65:1 and across all phase angles.
The
MRFE6VP61K25 has applications in defence/aerospace amplifiers, CO2
laser exciters, plasma generators, magnetic resonance imaging RF
amplifier systems, particle accelerator amplifiers, FM and DVB-T
broadcast amplifiers, and a wide variety of HF/VHF communications
equipment linear amplifiers over the frequency range from 1.8 to 600MHz.
The
MRFE6VP61K25H/HS can be used single-ended or in a push-pull
configuration, while its robust 24dB gain allows for fewer stages in
many amplifier designs.
The power transistor is available in bolt-down and solder-down ceramic packaging. www.rell.com
The new power transistor is rated at 1.25kW.
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Engineers Australia conferences
The Systems Engineering and Test and Evaluation conference (SETE2011) with the theme “Systems engineering in the next decade” will be held on 2-4 May in Canberra. It will focus on the experiences, lessons and issues of systems integration. The Australian Control Conference (AUCC2011)
will be held on 10-11 November 2011 in Melbourne. It will provide a
forum for Australian researchers, students and control engineers from
industry and government organisations to exchange ideas and recent
results, as well as discuss current problems, arising in control
engineering research and industrial practice. Other events
The 10th National SCADA conference
will be held on 1-2 March in Sydney. The event will host a program of
key Industry personnel to address issues surrounding the SCADA industry
and topics raised at the previous summit. Email registration@informa.com.au for more information.
Cisco’s annual marquee event, Cisco Live
will be held in Melbourne on 29 March – 1 April. It will offer three
distinct event programs (Networkers, IT Management and Service
Provider) and provide technical education. Email cisco@veritas.com.au for more information.
Ovum is hosting a breakfast seminar on the Data centre explosion and its technologies
in Sydney on 28 March to explore the data center market locally, its
impact and opportunities to Australian enterprises. Other topics
include how to keep the data centres cool, and what impacts the rapid
expansion and massive investment have to the enterprise buyer. Email jdq@ovum.com for more information.
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