CDSA

“AI and Security Converge” is not just the theme of the Content Delivery & Security Association’s (CDSA) Content Protection Summit. Artificial intelligence is also increasingly impacting every one of us in a multitude of ways.

It is making things better and easier than was ever possible before.

In today’s world, as consumers and business-people we have GPS-reliant features baked into about every device we own and use, from our phones, to cars, to cameras. The aspect of “location” and knowing where we are and where we are going has become something we have gotten so used to so rapidly that it has started to be completely taken for granted.

We all tend to get quite frustrated when we no longer have a connection, even if it is for a few moments while our device tried to locate a few more GPS signals and we go from that “big blue dot” of determining roughly where we are to that comforting small dot that means “it’s OK, I’ve got our location.”

For those of us who are older, we remember a previous time when there was no GPS … or it was very spotty.

We still had physical maps and other “traditional” forms of location that were reliable … especially in a pinch. Ah, we have come so far!

And, in much the same way that our consumer lives have leveraged GPS to do remarkable things, so have the militaries of our and every other country. GPS is so fundamental to the “war-making machine” that modern armies and air forces use it to not only plan and execute their ground and airborne actions, but to deliver bombs and other things exactly on-target.

Which is exactly why disrupting or maintaining GPS is a strategic part of the battle plan, and why “the war around GPS” has been a very active yet rarely highlighted battle aspect in the Ukraine and more recently in Israel.

GPS has been being actively jammed by some forces, while being supplemented with local solutions less susceptible to jamming … all in an effort to keep your side functional while forcing the opposition to lose all the advantages that GPS offers.

Meanwhile, the people and businesses in these regions have been dramatically impacted. Anything that relies on GPS is at risk. Phone and car locations services no longer work (I say this casually but think about how much we rely on this now).

We use these mapping, routing, and location aspects so frequently and they are so reliable that we have adopted them completely.

Going back to some previous non-GPS method is not only hard … but might be impossible.

What we used to fill the gap, like paper maps, are not even out there … and certainly not right at our fingertips like they were back prior to the modern days of GPS.

So far, I have really been speaking to the more obvious aspects of how GPS is used. But there is another fundamental aspect that GPS provides that is used in an additional number of ways: time. GPS, at its core, is about time.

It works through extremely tight coordination of time … which in turn is used by GPS and other systems to synchronize things … like broadcast signals.

Once the GPS signal is gone/jammed, those devices that use GPS as a fundamental timing signal across regions start to have issues.

This risk has been recognized for years, and there have been “local rack-based systems” that – through a LOT of work to keep things in time synchronization to the accuracy needed (beyond what a computer clock uses and sync’s to) – some backup capabilities have been in place.

But these are very expensive, and very operationally intensive. Meaning that, other than the big operations, few can afford these solutions … and none want the complexity and cost.

But this has been getting easier, through companies like Hoptroff (hoptroff.com) that virtualize the issue and have cleverly figured out how to provide extremely accurate time as a SaaS Service.

I am not endorsing Hoptroff, but rather just highlighting what I have found to be an amazing solution that makes addressing the issues of time (with or without GPS) relatively easy using extremely innovative approaches that seem like magic.

Yes, I am impressed by what they do. So much so and the underlying risk of time that I am asking Tim Richards, CEO of Hoptroff to present on this topic at our CPS@IBC and CPS@LA events.

From a security perspective, I personally had not really appreciated how critical GPS and the underlying aspect of accurate time is to our societies and business (I knew about the war aspects), and in speaking to others in our community they also had under-appreciated this aspect too.

So, I am highlighting it here, for all of us in this CDSA community. If you had not thought about this aspect and the underlying risks – professionally and personally – maybe give it some thought, put it in your priority list, and start developing some form of plan. For some of you, this might be a key topic for your org and others to talk about.

For others, this might just be more of an intellectual curiosity with the hope that you are never directly impacted.

But, since we are in the risk management business, I encourage all of you to at least have this risk visible and appreciated to some degree.

It was something I had missed, and I appreciate a friend highlighting it to me.

============================

** By Richard Atkinson, President, Content Delivery & Security Association **