Security Super Bowl: Here’s how stadiums think about IT

For CommScope’s Thierry Chau, capacity and caution are king.

The network infrastructure company operates cellular data and wireless connectivity systems in more than two-thirds of the NFL stadiums across the country, supporting everything that makes a live event tick, from mobile entry and cashless sales to fan-generated internet traffic. (How else will you post that #touchdown tweet?)

Chau, CommScope’s VP of market development who specializes in large venues, recently spoke with IT Brew about the challenges of keeping high-density networks functioning and safe—whether they’re enabling fans to buy a beer during a Sunday night football game or Swifties trying to livestream a performance of “All Too Well (10 Minute Version).”

According to Chau, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of wireless, touchless, and cashless technologies, putting a premium on network stability and capacity.

“The adoption rate was forced upon us, and it was kind of expected. So, [in] places like the Dallas Cowboys and a lot of [other] NFL stadiums, there was no option to have paper tickets. To reopen, they went ticketless,” he said. “That puts a demand on the wireless network.”

Keeping pace with that demand means making sure the venue has enough bandwidth to accommodate everyone at once. On a high level, this means ensuring access to licensed and unlicensed spectrum that can carry high-density 5G mobile and Wi-Fi traffic, he said.

“Both sides have technical challenges around putting that much spectrum and that much gear into an area that’s fairly confined,” Chau said.

From a security perspective, Chau said admins typically build privacy into a venue’s infrastructure so that users can’t see other network users, or so that the default internet gateway is the only host that shows up in a network scan.

Large-scale networks are also engineered to spot and prevent popular scams, like the “evil twin” scheme that mimics a venue’s real Wi-Fi network and tries to steal a user’s data once someone unwittingly connects to it.

Most enterprise Wi-Fi networks can detect these “malicious rogues”and prevent other users from connecting while admins pinpoint the source and shut them down, according to Chau. Administrators can apply artificial intelligence tools to “fingerprint” such behaviors and proactively alert security staff the next time the pattern surfaces, he said.

In man-in-the-middle attacks, another common scam, a bad actor will try to capture signals emanating from users’ phones searching for networks to which they’ve previously connected. (That’s why Chau said you should always tell your phone to “forget” the coffee shop’s Wi-Fi network when you’re done using it.) Use of an encrypted browser usually provides some protection against bad actors tracking your online activity this way, he noted.

Administrators also have to make sure the network isn’t consumed by capacity-hogging background apps.

Photo syncing services that automatically start dumping freshly taken gameday selfies and winning-touchdown shots into the cloud used to be a problem. Now, admins “have gotten a little smarter,” Chau said. “They’ll filter some of those sites out so that traffic can be consumed for other things, as opposed to just being consumed directly with uploading photos.”

Chau’s takeaway for network administrators? Make sure you think about upgrades holistically, not in a piecemeal fashion. After all, fans won’t be able to enjoy the touchless venue entry or super-fast Wi-Fi if their virtual tickets refuse to load or the DHCP server is bottlenecked.

“When you’re building a large-scale network, everything has to scale within that ecosystem, not just the access, or the switching. The core also has to come, and the backhaul as well,” Chau said. “It’s only as strong as that least common denominator.”