Security industry standards

The key elements that are required of the alarm transmission system within the EN standard, that can be defined as functions are :

Information security
Protecting the information sent from being read or modified.

Substitution
Protecting the communications device from substitution and protecting the messages sent from replay attack.

Reporting time
The availability of the communication path(s), includes the connection to the alarm panel.

Transmission time
The time taken to send/acknowledge a message sent by the system .

Power
The ability to keep the system operational during local mains failure.

Each of the elements of an ATS has grades of performance associated to them described in Table 1. ATS systems are defined from 1 through to 6 (ATS1, 2 etc…6).