Privacy Concerns for UWB technology?

[Damien O'Rourke]

Hi,

I was at a talk last night on Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology which is
sometimes referred to as "Bluetooth on Steroids".
An example of what a UWB home might look like was given and it mainly
consisted of everything that a normal
home has today except without the wires.  So you have your plasma TV
connected to your DVD player using
UWB and you can hook up a camcorder to it as well etc.

UWB offers rates of about 100Mb/s which is comparable with the 802.11n
standard.  I asked the speaker what
was the general thoughts on privacy concerns with this technology and he
basically said there wasn't any concerns
but I don't think it was something he had thought about before.  UWB works
over a very large bandwidth (the  FCC
allocated something like 7GHz of the spectrum for it) however it uses very
low power.  Its range is very limited (about
10m or so).  I don't know much about the technology itself but he mentioned
that is was something like spread
spectrum so I assume it uses some kind of pseudorandom code to allow
successful requisition of signals.

I am curious about the privacy issue however.  The speaker said that
encryption would be used and that that would
protect a persons privacy but at these high data rates would encryption not
hinder the overall process?  I assume
a stream cipher like RC4 would be used as in WiFi?  I realise that the range
in this case is very small and that privacy
is not as big a problem as other wireless technologies however this doesn't
stop your next door neighbour watching the
home made video of you and your family on holidays.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Damien.

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