ENCRYPTION ENGINE

Sep 1, 2009 12:00 PM

EF Johnson Technologies introduced the Johnson Encryption Machine (JEM II), an embedded solution that is designed to provide enhanced security for mission-critical communications in a smaller form factor.

Encryption engines — including EF Johnson's JEM I product — often are housed in a box that is separate from the rest of the network, said Ed Kelly, EF Johnson's vice president of marketing and business development. In contrast, JEM II is hosted on a PCMCIA card that will run on any PC platform, he said.

“In other solutions where you need encrypted communications, there's typically a box that sits outside in a rack that encrypts the stuff and passes it onto the console, so there's a part of your encryption set that's unsecure,” Kelly said. “By embedding it directly into the computing platform that hosts your console application, there's no physical point where you can get the data unsecured.”

The PCMCIA form factor also can be more cost effective, because no external boxes are needed, Kelly said. This is especially true in situations where an operator must rent rack space.

In addition to its physical attributes, JEMS II provides AES/DES encryption capability and features 10% to 25% more processing power than the vendor's JEM I product, Kelly said. Leveraging JEM II capabilities in the EF Johnson StarGate Dispatch Console enables call processing of up to 350 simultaneous encrypted calls.

In other news, EF Johnson unveiled the Hybrid IP25 — a Project 25-compliant infrastructure system designed to let first responders roam between the vendor's trunked and conventional systems. The solution leverages the fact that EF Johnson uses a native IP infrastructure for both its conventional and trunked solutions, so roaming between such systems is “almost seamless,” handled automatically by the network and allows for very similar feature sets, regardless which system the user is on, Kelly said.