In an amusement park, wireless devices are used to post the queue length and wait time for each of the rides. Can you think of an infrastructure that could enable patrons to do online interaction? Assume appropriate requirements and a potential solution.

Question

You do need some forms of authentication and encryption.
What are the most important parameters you would be concerned with? Explain clearly.

Answer 1

Some security issues also need to be addressed for such a system. First of all, proper authentication of the user needs to be done in order to avoid unauthorized usage. If this is not done, then users from outside the network can get into the network and cause considerable damage. Hence we need to have a scheme to authenticate each user in the system. One way could be to give passwords to each user so that each time the user queries the network in its wireless device, the network would ask the user to punch in the password.

Moreover, public/private key cryptography could be used to achieve increased security.

(a) One option would be to use the same key for both encryption and decryption purposes. Therefore, as long as the key is known only to the sender and the receiver, this scheme works perfectly. But if someone else gets hold of the key, then there is a threat to security.

(b) In a more elegant scheme, we could have a public key that is known to all the nodes (even the intruder nodes). The message to be sent would be encrypted using a public key. But in order to decrypt the message, the receiver would need a private key. In this way the intruder node would not be able to access the message as it does not know the private key.