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Meshnet Digital Armor To Protect Tanks
An anonymous reader writes "General Dynamics Canada and Secure Computing have partnered to develop Meshnet, a hardware/software firewall designed to protect networks and digital devices inside tanks and other military vehicles from hostile computer and virus attacks. Without adequate protection a tech savvy enemy can infiltrate networks, manipulate information, and deny crews the data they need to participate in modern warfare. Exactly such an event happened last year to an Israeli crew, when hackers from Hezbollah eavesdropped on their communications. 'The system uses Secure Computing's off-the-shelf Sidewinder Security Appliance ... Sidewinder consolidates all major Internet security functions into a single system, providing "best-of-breed" antivirus and spyware network protection "against all types of threats, both known and unknown," according to Secure Computing.'"
This unsubstantiated BS as a justification for an obvious product placement requires more scrutiny. I don't doubt that there IS a chance that some enemy force could have the capability to "hack" a tank, but the "Exactly such an event happened last year to an Israeli crew" needs some evidence.
Dominant Meme
No one wants to suggest the obvious, which is systems like this should never require antivirus and spyware support. For mission critical systems, the only thing they should use is embedded devices where the only way to install additional software is by flashing the firmware on the device. Also, use of a hardened kernel would be nice...
The easy option: Don't have any remote communication/data systems connected to vehicle control systems, unfortunately there's already a lot of hardware out there already.
The solution the US military will come up with: Spend trillions setting up a super intelligent AI that can defeat hackers on the fly and control all military weapons on it's own to spare ever needing to send real troops into battle again... it will be named Skynet...
How do I get my products advertised as articles on Slashdot? I imagine that could be pretty lucrative. Who do I pay?
Any security consultant worth his salt would be aghast at the military taking up a posture that allows for a single point of failure. Defense in depth is the current mechanism of choice... talk about putting all of your eggs in one basket.
if I claimed I was emperor just because some watery tart lobbed a scimitar at me they'd put me away!
Is the military so stupid they're actually using Windows-based software (or software running ANY consumer OS for that matter) in battlefields? If so, there's been a major drop in their design and code standards in the past few years.
Also, what's the threat? "This was reportedly the case during Israel's incursion into South Lebanon last year, where Hezbollah hackers were allegedly able to monitor IDF communications, giving the guerrillas a leg up in attacking Israeli armor." sounds like ordinary signals intelligence. You don't fight that with firewalls and antivirus software, you fight it with encryption and electronic countermeasures like dummy sources to fight tracking and traffic analysis.
No, there are not. There are very few avenues to crack any system.
#1. Attack the daemon listening on an open port.
#2. Trojans.
#3. Exploiting a vulnerability in an app when fed specific data (IE is a good example).
#4. Viruses that attach themselves to other apps.
Yeah, you've just repeated yourself without explaining how the firewall is supposed to do anything.
No, it is not. They all have the same, limited, avenues of attack. There is nothing "different" about that.