New challenges for telephone companies to secure switching systems

Describes typical operations channels for a circuit switch and the generic requirements that should be met to secure these channels. The author discusses the technical analysis of these features, and the major results obtained from analyses of circuit switches produced by various vendors. The general technological trend in switch design has been to incorporate a flexible architecture that allows assigning any operations function to any input port; the assignments are software-driven. The newer switches, in general, all provide this flexibility. All switches have login features that can be deployed on a majority of operations channels. Different switches have different levels of protection against password cracking. Time-out is a common feature among switches and resource control is available on a limited basis. Except for a few conspicuous exceptions, switches generally provide a security log and associated audit features.<>