Secure wireless network brings Wisconsin cities together

In a display of neighborly cooperation, three small cities in Wisconsin have teamed to install an interconnected encryption-secured microwave system that provides a wireless link to the law-enforcement and safety systems.

The Wisconsin cities of Fitchburg, Sun Prairie and Middleton — which coincidentally was just named the No. 1 pick in Money Magazine’s annual “Best Places to Live” — elected to use the same police-management application as a group purchase a few years ago for police-dispatch centers to replace legacy systems.

The three cities, within 20 miles of each others, also wanted direct network connections to share law-enforcement information that includes dispatch and records access. That started out as a T-1 private line, but this June the cities cut over to higher-speed point-to-point microwave connections with a flexible encryption capability based on the CipherOptics CipherEngine. According to Matt Prough, Fitchburg’s IT manager for police systems, one of the main challenges in deploying wireless for law-enforcement data was making sure the cities met Wisconsin’s strict rules on wireless security.

“When we did the microwave project, one thing we were required to use in Wisconsin was FIPS 201-approved encryption,” Prough says. The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for encryption is determined by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology and is used to access some federal databases. Prough says the state of Wisconsin’s policy also calls for FIPS in specific types of state-government wireless deployments.

“That policy grandfathers older systems for a period but new wireless system need to use encryption,” he says.

The three cities elected to use microwave antennas and radios from CommConnect, which at 100Mbps were faster and more cost-effective than the terrestrial T-1, Prough says. But he adds that getting encryption into the mix with microwave was a little tricky.

Prough says the encryption options included buying microwave radios with built-in encryptors or putting in separate gateway encryptors. The cities chose to deploy a separate encryption/decryption gateway and went with the CipherOptics Ethernet Security Gateway ESG100 and the CipherEngine Policy & Key Manager, which allows for Layer-2 encryption of law-enforcement traffic on a virtual LAN basis. Prough says one benefit was encryption control over traffic that needed to remain unencrypted.

“I wanted to send unencrypted traffic to the fire department while leaving other law-enforcement traffic encrypted, and CipherOptics lets me do that,” he says.

Fitchburg was designated the central encryption key manager, and Prough says the key-generating mechanism is set to regenerate encryption keys every four hours. “This exceeds the government recommendations,” he notes.