Delivery of encryption keys in TETRA networks

Abstract

Professional mobile radio networks, to which TETRA belongs, are used mostly by public safety departments, which are in nature non-commercial.

This thesis was produced for the company Secure Land Communications. Due to our customers’ needs for a mechanism to distribute their communication’s encryption keys over the air, the End-to-End Encryption project with Over The Air Keying (OTAK) feature was created. Our job was to test the behavior of a network when extra load due to this new solution is introduced, as well as discover any defects in order to make the proper corrections. In order to do this, we defined a test strategy and test plan including a traffic load profile, a suitable test environment and test cases focusing on high loads of OTAK traffic, so we would identify any important errors, submit them for correction, and test the solutions of those corrections.

Our verification yielded the validation of the correct operation of features and many defect discoveries, some of them very critical, which were corrected to have as a result a significant improvement and a better solution which benefits our company’s portfolio. Not everything, however, has been solved at the moment of finishing this thesis, there are still issues and some new errors were introduced as part of the introduced fixes, these are expected to be solved during subsequent releases of the solution, together with minor defects not corrected during this first phase.