📡 Why Radio Needs a NIST-Grade Framework

🔐 Radio Has No NIST — and That’s a National Risk

In cybersecurity, we don’t guess. We don’t “hope the firewall holds.” We follow a proven playbook — the NIST frameworks — five functions every operator knows: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover.

In radio? We’ve got vendor brochures, FCC rules from the analog era, and “best practices” based on who bought lunch at NAB.

If the airwaves are the last open system in America — the only infrastructure where a single station can still reach millions without permission from a platform — then treating them casually isn’t just negligent.

It’s dangerous.

1️⃣ The Gap

• NIST frameworks unify federal agencies, private industry, and critical infrastructure operators around repeatable processes for identifying, protecting, detecting, responding, and recovering.

• In radio, there is no equivalent.

• We have EAS Part 11 rules, broadcast ownership reporting, and a patchwork of voluntary vendor training — none of which address modern threats like IP hijacks, metadata spoofing, or orchestrated interference.

2️⃣ What It Would Look Like for Radio

• Identify – Real-time inventory of broadcast assets, RF spectrum use, and emergency comms dependencies.

• Protect – Vendor-agnostic hardening standards for AoIP, STL, and playout systems.

• Detect – Live telemetry + SDR grids that flag anomalies before the public hears them.

• Respond – Pre-scripted, policy-driven failover to trusted backup signals and messaging.

• Recover – Post-incident audit trails that meet legal, regulatory, and insurance standards.

3️⃣ Above & Beyond Existing RFC/FRP Work

• My FRP/RFC proposals to date focus on specific attack surfaces and orchestration layers.

• This framework is macro-level: it unites technical, operational, and policy elements into a single national standard for broadcast resilience.

• It’s not about telling engineers what gear to buy — it’s about ensuring the signal can survive anything.

4️⃣ The Call

• NIST has frameworks for cybersecurity, privacy, AI risk, and supply chain resilience.

• We need NIST-BR — the Broadcast Resilience Framework.

• And we need it authored by operators, engineers, and emergency managers — not vendors and lobbyists.

If the airwaves are going to remain the last open system in America, they need to be defended with the same seriousness we give to power grids, pipelines, and the internet backbone. NIST showed the blueprint. Now radio needs to write its own.

Here’s a direct cross-map of NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 to radio station infrastructure

📡 NIST CSF 2.0 → Broadcast Resilience Framework (BRF) Mapping

The bottom line:

Frameworks don’t just protect infrastructure — they connect the people who run it.

We don’t have to wait for Washington, NAB, or a vendor to hand us a binder. We can start now — trading checklists, running drills, sharing failures and fixes, and stress-testing each other’s systems until they break in the lab, not on the air.

The airwaves are still ours — but only if we fight for them.

If you’ve ever saved a signal at 2 AM with duct tape, a borrowed XLR, and a prayer, you belong in this conversation.

Let’s build the thing they’ll study in 20 years as the moment radio stopped waiting to be saved… and saved itself.

#BroadcastResilience #ZeroTrustRadio #NISTBR #PublicSafetyComms #EmergencyAlerting #RadioSecurity