In a new blog post, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) Cabling Standards Committee reports that TIA’s ANSI/TIA 5017 standard, which specifies requirements for analyzing security levels, and develops an individualized security framework for telecommunications infrastructures, is now officially under consideration to become an international standard.
"We are proud of the great work of our Customer Premises Cabling Committee that developed this critical security standard," states the TIA's blog. "Moving forward in a global process shows just how much international support, recognition, and value the physical network security standard has, and highlights the committee’s leadership in maintaining safe and reliable networks in the U.S.," adds the post.
According to TIA, the standard's international adoption process began in January 2018 when a New Work Item Proposal (NWIP) by Masood Shariff (chair of ANSI/ TIA-5017 project) was received positively by ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 25/ WG 3 and a new committee was created to develop an international version of the TIA-5017 physical network security standard.
ANSI/TIA-5017 was created based on U.S. federal government requests to improve the security of commercial buildings and reduce the possibility of disruptions to telecommunications infrastructure. The ANSI/TIA-5017 telecommunications physical network security standard is the result of over three years of collaborative development between telecommunications standards and security experts.
TIA notes that the ANSI/TIA-5017 standard stands apart from other security documents "because it provides a framework at every stage, that is customized to each structure. ANSI/TIA-5017 becomes the eyes and ears of a physical structure to generate alarms and alerts when there is unauthorized activity in the building, including specifications on how to create a log of the event and turn on surveillance cameras at the location," adds the consortium.
TIA says this customized approach allows each installation to develop its own security implementations to fit current and anticipated security needs at an affordable cost. Security functions and features in ANSI/TIA-5017 include:
- Risk assessment guidelines to establish the level of risk
- Three different levels of security the customer can implement to match the level of risk
- Security requirements for each telecommunications element at each chosen level of security
- Additional security requirements for those installations that Protected Distribution Systems (PDS)
- Intrusion Detection requirements
- Surveillance requirements especially for education premises
- Use of AIM (Automated Infrastructure Management) systems to enhance the overall security of the premise
TIA reports that from this point, the ISO standard is moving forward rapidly with a working draft 3 circulating as a ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 25/WG 3 committee ballot. The document will likely be technically complete by February 2020 and published thereafter.
"The international adoption of this standard is an important inflection point at which to recognize the efforts of contributing network security experts, however it is not an end point," notes TIA. "Continued collaboration to maintain and update the standard is underway, and will consider such impacts as 5G, IoT, and the constraints of classical computing-based encryption."