Posted on 03/14/2006 6:09:34 PM PST by blam
Computer codes row threatens £12bn jet order
By Francis Harris in Washington
(Filed: 15/03/2006)
Britain threatened the United States yesterday that it will cancel its £12 billion order for the new Joint Strike Fighter unless America agrees to give the Armed Forces full access to the warplane's critical computer codes.
Lord Drayson, Minister for Defence Procurement, issued the blunt warning as he arrived in Washington to address members of Congress.
Without full access to computer software the JSF could be ‘switched off’
The bad-tempered row not only threatens the 150-aircraft programme, but also the intimate Anglo-American military partnership.
Without full access to computer software, the next-generation aircraft would effectively remain under the control of the Americans and could be "switched off" without warning.
"I'm aware that the British can be accused of understatement on these things," Lord Drayson said. "We do expect this technology transfer to take place, but if it does not take place we will not be able to purchase these aircraft."
The programme is critical to Britain's much-trumpeted "expeditionary" strategy, which is based on two new multi-billion pound aircraft carriers.
The Royal Navy plans to equip the new 65,000-ton vessels with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), whose construction is being led by the US firm Lockheed Martin.
But Lord Drayson said that Britain had a "Plan B" and would implement it if an agreement with the Americans is not been signed by the end of the year.
He refused to offer details, but it is widely believed that this could involve the Royal Navy buying a new naval version of the Typhoon, or the French-built Rafale.
Lord Drayson said that talks with the Bush administration were going well. But the problem has little to do with America's government, which has been trying for five years to exempt Britain from stringent technology transfer rules.
A Republican congressional source said that the problem lay with the Pentagon, not with Congress.
The current US rules mean that British requests for almost anything linked to American technologies can take 20 days or more to get approval. British officers say that if applied to the JSF, it would severely restrict the aircraft's operational use.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, Chief of the Air Staff, who was accompanying Lord Drayson, said: "We have to be able to integrate our weapons, sensors, information and fuse them together on the [aircraft]. If we can't do it, then we won't be able to fight effectively. That's why this is absolutely critical."
Pentagon is full of idiots.
I actually pinged some professional code slingers so that you could get a second or third opinion from known authorities on the matter (i.e. "don't take my word for it").
Physical possession of the hardware by the best of state-supported (i.e. unlimited funds) hackers makes security very...mmm...problematic.
For example, the code in question must be decrypted prior to each instruction being executed by the CPU (otherwise the CPU doesn't know what to do). Well, with physical possession, a hacker can put physical electrodes onto the CPU inputs. This enables the hacker to see the instruction being executed.
Do that long enough and in many cases you'll have the whole software program.
And this is just one example of "possession hacking."
The brits were some of the biggest pushers of the JSF. They are building two new aircraft carriers designed around these planes.
They were the biggest reason the vertical takeoff version was required.
The brits love the versitility of these planes. They saw it as the next generation of the harrier.
The US marines will also be users of this variation.
I would have posted a reply earlier, but I've been having a difficult time stopping the laughter over what you said here. I'm just not ready, sorry.
The UK MoD professionals are highly reliable stewards of our technical info.
The traitors of the Cold War were MI6/Foreign Office political types.
The whole encryption circuit board could be encased in epoxy, which would make it very difficult to tap the circuit leads.
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Please note that under the conditions given in this thread that round the clock security by the U.S. would not be possible (because another nation would have physical possession).
Further, keep in mind that cryptographic security ceases to exist when the circuit decrypts the instruction for the CPU...the very point where a hacker would want to attach physical data probes.
We could add a little thermite and intrustion detection on the chip, encased in an opaque epoxy resin brick, just to be sure.
...and we're talking about the government labs of the U.S., the UK, or Israel.
Nice!
OK, that would do away with the laser drill...but now they'd use progressive acid drips to get to target depth.
I'd be surprised if the box didn't have some sort of self-destruct mechanism. It could be triggered in the event of a crash or physical penetration of the case.
One would think.
But protecting data from a 1st World State-sponsored hacker with essentially unlimited funds and physical access is a difficult proposition...especially with something that has to be 100% functional in battle.
So what? By the time you get done decompiling all two million lines of Ada code to produce a pile of several bazillion opcodes - or if you're lucky, some sort of wacky C program that isn't itself compilable - and then putting all back together into an actually useable form, the plane will be obsolete. This is about being able to integrate their own systems into the thing, which you can easily do if you're provided the source code, and which you cannot do, as a practical matter, without the source, the theoretical possibility of reverse-engineering notwithstanding.
Great posts and discussion. With enough effort, and $, they could get the code, and eventually figure out most of what is going on, but to rebuild into any working system would require very considerable expese. The issue is not that, but clearly whether the US is going to accept the world's demand that all software become "open source", as championed by the U.N., and now finding it's way onto our front doorstep.
Another major story of this type involves Israel, another ally. They are attempting to purchase an open source company here in the US, and the deal has so far been blocked.
Both of these stories will be interesting to watch. It's my hope the government is finally becoming aware of the value of US "intellectual property" in general, and will block both of these deals, or at a minimum require much greater riches for their sale.
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/153?ref=rss
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