This is the 16th article in the award-winning “Real Words or Buzzwords?” series about how real words become empty words and stifle technology progress, also published on SecurityInfoWatch.com.
By Ray Bernard, PSP, CHS-III
The main problem with “IP-based” and similar terms is the industry’s initial misunderstanding of them, which led to products and systems that didn’t really live up to their labels.
All-in-one RWOB
MAXIMIZE YOUR SECURITY OPERATIONS CAPABILITIES
Upgrade your security operations effectiveness through Security Technology Strategic Planning. Provably get more for your company's security technology investment.
★ ★ ★ GET NOTIFIED! ★ ★ ★
SIGN UP to be notified by email the day a new Real Words or Buzzwords? article is posted!
Real Words or Buzzwords?
The Award-Winning Article Series
#1 Proof of the buzzword that killed tech advances in the security industry—but not other industries.
#2 Next Generation (NextGen): A sure way to tell hype from reality.
#3 Customer Centric: Why all security industry companies aren't customer centric.
#4 Best of Breed: What it should mean to companies and their customers.
#5 Open: An openness scale to rate platforms and systems
#6 Network-friendly: It's much more than network connectivity.
#7 Mobile first: Not what it sounds like.
#8 Enterprise Class (Part One): To qualify as Enterprise Class system today is world's beyond what it was yesterday.
#9 Enterprise Class (Part Two): Enterprise Class must be more than just a top-level label.
#10 Enterprise Class (Part Three): Enterprise Class must be 21st century technology.
#11 Intuitive: It’s about time that we had a real-world testable definition for “intuitive”.
#12 State of the Art: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.
#13 True Cloud (Part One): Fully evaluating cloud product offerings.
#14 True Cloud (Part Two): Examining the characteristics of 'native-cloud' applications.
#15 True Cloud (Part Three): Due diligence in testing cloud systems.
#16 IP-based, IP-enabled, IP-capable, or IP-connectable?: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.
#17 Five Nines: Many people equate high availability with good user experience, yet many more factors are critically important.
#18 Robust: Words like “robust” must be followed by design specifics to be meaningful.
#19 Serverless Computing – Part 1: Why "serverless computing" is critical for some cloud offerings.
#20 Serverless Computing – Part 2: Why full virtualization is the future of cloud computing.
#21 Situational Awareness – Part 1: What products provide situational awareness?
#22 Situational Awareness – Part 2: Why system designs are incomplete without situational awareness?
#23 Situational Awareness – Part 3: How mobile devices change the situational awareness landscape?
#24 Situational Awareness – Part 4: Why situational awareness is a must for security system maintenance and acceptable uptime.
#25 Situational Awareness – Part 5: We are now entering the era of smart buildings and facilities. We must design integrated security systems that are much smarter than those we have designed in the past.
#26 Situational Awareness – Part 6: Developing modern day situational awareness solutions requires moving beyond 20th century thinking.
#27 Situational Awareness – Part 7: Modern day incident response deserves the help that modern technology can provide but doesn’t yet. Filling this void is one of the great security industry opportunities of our time.
#28 Unicity: Security solutions providers can spur innovation by envisioning how the Unicity concept can extend and strengthen physical access into real-time presence management.
#29 The API Economy: Why The API Economy will have a significant impact on the physical security industry moving forward.
#31 The Built Environment: In the 21st century, “the built environment” means so much more than it did just two decades ago.
#32 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been a hot phrase in IT for several years, but do its promises hold true for the physical security industry?
#33 Software-Defined: Cloud-computing technology, with its many software-defined elements, is bringing self-scaling real-time performance capabilities to physical security system technology.
#34 High-Performance: How the right use of "high-performance" can accelerate the adoption of truly high-performing emerging technologies.
#35 Erasure Coding: Why RAID drive arrays don’t work anymore for video storage, and why Erasure Coding does.
#36 Presence Control: Anyone responsible for access control management or smart building experience must understand and apply presence control.
#37 Internet+: The Internet has evolved into much more than the information superhighway it was originally conceived to be.
#38 Digital Twin: Though few in physical security are familiar with the concept, it holds enormous potential for the industry.
#39 Fog Computing: Though commonly misunderstood, the concept of fog computing has become critically important to physical security systems.
#40 Scale - Part 1: Although many security-industry thought leaders have advocated that we should be “learning from IT,” there is still insufficient emphasis on learning about IT practices, especially for large-scale deployments.
#41 Scale - Part 2: Why the industry has yet to fully grasp what the ‘Internet of Things’ means for scaling physical security devices and systems.
#42 Cyberspace - Part 1: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.
#43 Cyber-Physical Systems - Part 1: We must understand what it means that electronic physical security systems are cyber-physical systems.
#44 Cyberspace - Part 2: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.
#45 Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Examining the differences in these technologies and their respective benefits for the security industry.
#46 VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: At first glance, VDI doesn’t seem to have much application to a SOC deployment. But a closer look reveals why it is actually of critical importance.
#47 Hybrid Cloud: The definition of hybrid cloud has evolved, and it’s important to understand the implications for physical security system deployments.
#48 Legacy: How you define ‘legacy technology’ may determine whether you get to update or replace critical systems.
#49 H.264 - Part 1: Examining the terms involved in camera stream configuration settings and why they are important.
#50 H.264 - Part 2: A look at the different H.264 video frame types and how they relate to intended uses of video.
#51 H.264 - Part 3: Once seen as just a marketing term, ‘smart codecs’ have revolutionized video compression.
#52 Presence Technologies: The proliferation of IoT sensors and devices, plus the current impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, have elevated the capabilities and the importance of presence technologies.
#53 Anonymization, Encryption and Governance: The exponential advance of information technologies requires an exponential advance in the application of data protection.
#54 Computer Vision: Why a good understanding of the computer vision concept is important for evaluating today’s security video analytics products.
#55 Exponential Technology Advancement: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.
#56 IoT and IoT Native: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.
#57 Cloud Native IoT: A continuing look at what it means to have a 'True Cloud' solution and its impact on today’s physical security technologies.
#58 Bluetooth vs. Bluetooth LE: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.
#59 LPWAN - Low-Power Wide Area Networks: Emerging IoT smart sensor devices and systems are finding high-ROI uses for building security and safety.
#60 Edge Computing and the Evolving Internet: Almost 15 billion personal mobile devices and over 22 billion IoT devices operating daily worldwide have shifted the Internet’s “center of gravity” from its core to its edge – with many implications for enterprise physical security deployments
#61 Attack Surface: (Published as a Convergence Q&A Column article)An attack surface is defined as the total number of all possible entry points for unauthorized access into any system.
#62 Autonomous Compute Infrastructure: We’re on the brink of a radical new approach to technology, driven by autonomous operations.
#63 Physical Security Watershed Moment: We have reached a juncture in physical security technology that is making most of our past thinking irrelevant.
#64 Access Chaos: For 50 years we have had to live with physical access control systems that were not manageable at any large scale.
#65 AI and Automatiom: Will engineering talent, business savvy and capital investment from outside the physical security industry bring technology startups that transform reactive security to proactive and preventive security operations?
#66 Interoperability: Over the next five years, the single greatest determinant of the extent to which existing security industry companies will thrive or die is interoperability.
#67 AI Model : One key factor affects the accuracy, speed and computational requirements of AI
#68 Interoperability – Part 2: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.
#69 Interoperability – Part 3: There are two types of security system interoperability – both of which are important considerations in the design of security systems and the selection of security system products.
#70 Operationalizing AI: AI is not a product, but a broad category of software that enables products and systems to do more than ever before possible. How do we put it to good use?
#71 Shallow IT Adoption – Part 1: It’s not just about being IT compliant, it’s also about leveraging IT capabilities to properly serve the needs and wants of today’s technologically savvy customers.
#72 E-waste – an important security system design issue: Now e-waste is an important design issue not just because of growing e-waste regulations, but because educated designers can save enterprise security system customers a lot of money.
#73 LRPoE - Long Reach Power over Ethernet: A dozen factors have improved the business attractiveness of network cameras, making it more desirable to place cameras further from existing IT closets than the 328 foot limitation of standard Ethernet cable.
#74 NIST Declares Physical Access Control Systems are OT: Does it really mean anything that OT has joined the parade of labels (IT, IoT, and then IIoT) variously getting applied to security systems?
#75 Future Ready: Google sees the term "future-ready" trending up across many subject domains. But does that term apply to the physical security industry and its customers?
#76 Data KLiteracy: AI needs data. Thus, the ability of any department or division in an organization (including security) to use AI effectively depends on its ability to effectively obtain and utilize data – including security.
#77 Security Intelligence (upcoming): AI brings two kinds of intelligence to physical security systems – people bring the third.
More to come about every other week.
For this article, we want to examine what the terms IP-based, IP-capable and IP-enabled have meant in the security industry, to understand how the security industry first misinterpreted those terms, and to finally determine what the terms really should mean so that we can start using them correctly in the context of 21st century networking. The main problem with “IP-based” and similar terms is the industry’s initial misunderstanding of them, which led to products and systems that didn’t really live up to their labels.
Internet Protocol (IP)
Internet Protocol is a network communications protocol that enables individual network devices to communicate to specific other network devices by using device IP addresses and a common data packet structure. IP addresses and IP data packets (formally called datagrams) are the two key networking elements defined by the Internet Protocol. That’s it.
However, it takes more than devices with IP addresses and correctly formatted data packets for communication to occur. There must be some standard way of handling data packet transmission, including error correction, transmission timing requirements, and so on.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
The Transmission Control Protocol was developed to provide reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of data between computers and devices that communicate using the Internet Protocol. The World Wide Web, email and file transfer applications, for example, rely on TCP. Because the TCP and IP protocols are used together for local area networks (LANS) and the Internet, networks were initially referred to as “TCP/IP networks”, and the label was later shortened to “IP networks”. Thus “we speak IP” was one of several similar marketing phrases that arose within the physical security industry. These were used to assert that “Our company is IT-savvy, we understand TCP/IP networking, and our new products are IP-based.” The trouble was that—with the exception of the few companies which had strong roots in the IT world—these assertions were not really true.
The Internet Protocol Suite
In the IT world, the term “suite” is used to denote a collection of applications or communication protocols that work together. The two main protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite are TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) and IP (Internet Protocol).
However, networking and the Internet rely on a suite of at least 60 protocols, in addition to TCP and IP, to support communications for networked applications, and to support the management of network and Internet infrastructure. Furthermore, there are dozens of standards involved in securing network communications. In the IT world, due to the primary role played by TCP and IP, and because in the IT domain the need for the full suite of Internet protocols is well understood, the full Internet Protocol Suite is commonly referred to as “TCP/IP”, and the term “IP network” means a network whose infrastructure and its connected devices appropriately support the full Internet Protocol Suite.
This is a very different understanding than the one that existed for nearly 15 years after the security industry began placing security systems onto facility LANs and enterprise networks.
Many “IP-Based” Products Aren’t Fully IP-Based
As mentioned in the Real Words or Buzzwords? article, “State of the Art”, the industry was putting devices onto IP networks starting in the late 1990’s that didn’t support Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), and the industry didn’t develop a standard for a physical security device MIB (a management information base data file defined by SNMP) until 2015. As late as 2008, several brands of deployed IP cameras would go offline if the IT department were to run a basic Nmap scan of the network (a common practice), to get an up-to-date diagram and detailed information listing for all the devices on a network.
It is still easy to find security system deployments today where the cameras, IP card readers, access control and intrusion panels, servers and workstations don’t have their time clocks synchronized using Network Time Protocol (NTP). NTP is used to synchronize the clocks of networked computers and devices to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. The full use of NTP, accounting for local time zone variations, is one requirement for obtaining forensic quality evidence from electronic physical security systems.
Many IP cameras still do not include an option for local time zone identification in their video time display overlay. When video camera time overlay capabilities are used, many video management systems aren’t configured to ensure that the date and time on the connected cameras is correctly set, even though the ONVIF protocol (for example) supports time verification and setting the time per an NTP time source.
In manufacturing environments—where video cameras monitor manufacturing processes at 30 to 60 frames per second—the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) should be used to synchronize video server and camera clocks to the same time source that the manufacturing systems use. The use of PTP is also appropriate for Indoor Positioning Systems that track, for example, packages on high-speed conveyor belts or warehouse vehicles moving throughout the facility.
Many products don’t support SNMP version 3, and many of those who do still default to an earlier (i.e. non-secure) version. Many systems don’t support end-to-end system encryption of both data in transit and data at rest. Many products and systems default to non-secure modes for ease of installation and configuration, yet lack a single switch or command that places the product or system into a highly secure mode. Current day IT practice is to provide secure and well-documented IP networks and systems.
It is not just protocols that must be considered, but also network architecture. I have come across many corporate enterprise networks whose designs included redundant network paths, but whose video system deployments did not take them into account, and so the network switches on the redundant paths were not configured to support security video. Thus, needless video system failures occurred while the IT systems remained fully functional.
Although many IP cameras support DiffServ and/or DSCP (two Quality of Service protocols), I have found congested networks where QoS capabilities were not enabled, in spite of the customers’ having them enabled for their IT systems. Cisco’s valuable IP Video Surveillance Design Guides (available free online) go into detail about these and many other network considerations for security video.
These are just a few examples of the shortcomings to be found in today’s security system deployments, without taking cloud-based applications and cybersecurity into consideration.
What IP-Based Means Today
The following four definitions should be applied to the design, deployment and upkeep of electronic physical security systems. The standard of practice for product engineering today is agile development, which typically means semi-monthly or monthly releases of product software, and monthly or quarterly releases of product firmware, with product security updates released as soon as they are developed and fully tested.
IP-Based. Refers to designs and features sets of networkable products and systems that are optimized for performance, robustness, security, manageability and interoperability using relevant current-day network protocols, and IT standards and practices, and are easily upgradable for the inevitable revisions to protocols and standards and to correct security vulnerabilities.
IP-Capable. Should be used to refer to products and systems that were originally designed for analog or non-IP based communications, but which have been updated to also support IP-network-based communications, with full support for DHCP, HTTPS, NTP, SNMP, IPSec or other secure network communications, plus appropriate support for other relevant Internet protocols such as LDAP, RTSP, SIP, and so on, and are upgradable for revisions to protocols and standards.
IP-Enabled. Similar to IP-Capable, should refer to simple products that were originally designed for non-IP based communications, but which have been updated to provide secure IP-network-based communications with a single managing device, including full support for DHCP, HTTPS, NTP, SNMP, and IPSec or other secure network communications, and are upgradable for revisions to supported protocols and standards.
IP-Connectable. Should refer to devices that can connect via an Ethernet cable or Ethernet network using media converter or serial tunneling technology, but whose communications capabilities were designed for a different type of network, or for direct cable connectivity. For example, there are still security industry control boards that were originally designed for RS-232 or RS-422/485 serial communications. Their manufacturers embedded chipsets to their circuit boards to enable the devices to communication over an Ethernet network. Lantronix is one source for these chipsets and other reliable communications products. This approach is intended to be used for connecting two or more serial- communications-capable devices over an Ethernet network. Thus, the devices still retain the restrictions of their original communications method. So, for example, cannot transmit or receive data at the full speed of the Ethernet network they are connected to, but are restricted to receiving data at slower serial port communication data rates. Thus, IP-Connectable devices should not be called IP-Enabled or IP-Capable as these two terms imply more network and communications capability than the devices have.
The Internet of Things
The industry has declared that most electronic security system IP-based devices are now Internet of Things devices, in spite of the fact that they were not designed to act like proper IoT devices. Thus, the next Real Words or Buzzwords? article will answer address these terms: “IoT-capable”, “IoT-ready”, and “IoT device”.
Ray Bernard, PSP CHS-III, is the principal consultant for Ray Bernard Consulting Services (RBCS), a firm that provides security consulting services for public and private facilities (www.go-rbcs.com). He is the author of the Elsevier book Security Technology Convergence Insights available on Amazon. Mr. Bernard is a Subject Matter Expert Faculty Member of the Security Executive Council (SEC) and an active member of the ASIS International member councils for Physical Security and IT Security.