Philippine Army Special Forces Adopts Inrico PoC Communications Solution

Inrico, a global leading provider of professional wireless communications, has supported the Philippine Army Special Forces to modernize its communications by offering Push-to-talk over Cellular (PoC) terminals, dispatch consoles and management software.

With the new PoC system in place, the commanders are able to reach bases across the country from Luzon to Mindanao instantly and achieve unified dispatching whenever it’s necessary.

The Special Forces have been using two of Inrico’s PoC radio models, T320 and T199, along with the dispatch consoles, mainly in three scenarios, including daily patrol, special task execution and wide-area dispatching. Inrico solution’s geo features make it easy to plan patrol routes and set up automatic alarms in case the preset routes are not followed. AES256 encryption ensures whatever transmitted via the system, such as voice, text, picture, video, etc., are protected from interception. Inrico’s dispatch console visualizes the movement of all the terminals and facilitates dynamic individual call and group call during task execution.

Inrico takes comprehensive measures to ensure the integrity of the system, including software design and system deployment. Inrico’s software architecture is designed to ensure security of user access, information transmission, user data and device resource. Meanwhile, the system is deployed with firewalls and scanned regularly for potential vulnerability.

Secure Access

Basic monitoring and prevention measures of cyber-attack are built in the system. Abnormal service requests, such as frequent requests and HTTP post request with extremely large parameter data, will cause the service rejection. Moreover, user password is not stored as plain text in the system, instead it is stored with MD5 encryption; the password is transmitted with MD5 encryption during the communication process of user login; therefore, password leakage is extremely rare.

Safe Transmission

AES256 encryption technology is used to encrypt/decrypt information, such as voice, text, pictures, video, etc., and to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the data during transmission. The transmission is made temper-proof.

Terminal Data Leakage Protection（DLP）

Terminals are scattered in the taskforces in different regions, and the risk of data leakage is lingering. Through the security strategy of the management platform, PoC terminals can be remotely controlled, e.g., the encryption and storage of data, and the control can be configured for different levels of authority. In case of a device being reported lost, it can remotely erased and locked.

Authority Management

The management platform can remotely control the terminals in order to preemptively lower the risk of compromising system. It updates the terminal’s firmware version regularly, restrict installation of unauthorized APPs, and prevents accessing unrecognized mobile networks. The platform remotely manages the terminals all to make sure the whole system’s efficiency and resilience, e.g., it keeps the GPS on for some terminals, and some off.

Reliability Insurance

Inrico’s PoC platform adopts cloud computing technology. All the system servers run in the cloud. The computing, storage and bandwidth resources of the physical server are shared across the system. The failure of a single physical server does not affect the operation of the system. The server adopts distributed redundant deployment; key services run via two active virtual servers with automatic load sharing and idle resources scheduling. When the PTT service is busy in one server, it automatically switches to another available one to guarantee smooth push-to-talk across the system.