Secure communications for the emergency responder.

Secure, authenticated communications is the goal for most emergency operations.  Here we go through what it means to be secure.

What do we mean by secure?

Secure means safe, safe from interruption, and safe from someone hijacking your channel.  Secure can also mean safe from other people in your organization, like having a talk group on a 800mhz system, or something other access control mechanism.

What do we mean by authenticated?

Autheniticated means some method was used to verify the authenticy of a person or object.  Primarily used in computer systems, authentication is important in the digital world as it's easy to impersonate some one else.  An example is a voice radio.  A dispatcher or team member would probably recognize someones voice trying to impersonate another team member.  Our ears are incredibly good at sorting and verifying sounds.  Same goes for our eyes, we can recognize people from hundreds of yards away.  All that complex signal processing we have for our eyes and ears gets removed when we use email or digital messages.  Our minds still outpace many computers, and that design is either of evolutionary or intelligent design, depending on your belief in religion or lack of beliefs.  Whatever your belief, authentication is a necessary part of secure communications, especially where our eyes and ears can not authenticate a message.