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Navy Wants Cyber Weapons That Shoot Data Beams
ectotherm writes "By 2018, the US Navy hopes to equip its fighter jets with the ability to shoot data streams containing 'specialized waveforms and algorithms,' useful in an electronic attack or cyber-invasion. A few non-classified details here."
Electronic Warfare has been around since at least WWII but the idea that airplanes are going to be hacking anything more sophisticated than a WiFi network at Mach 2 is dubious. Sure, they have been able to own spectrum, but owning devices is a whole other story. With the advent of cheap system on chip solutions that include robust cryptographic silicon it will not be long before China and Russia are integrating that or better in their domestic and for export weapon systems.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
They'll put research funding into any idea that they've seen on Star Trek or read in a book somewhere.
It's led to most of their successes too though. That airplane-mounted laser that shoots down missles from the air? Totally sci-fi, and not even the book kind, that was given to them by Hollywood. It was a success in that it would work, just not in getting funding.
Their basic motto is "try everything and see what ends up working". Do you think most of their innovations started out as "holy shit this is obvious" concepts, or ones that 99% of the population would say "that's fucking retarded" when told about?
but that's not gonna fucking happen either.
The reason is if we extrapolate the trends in computing to 2020 say, and we assume that huge number of devices that nobody thinks of might have by then a tiny processor with an IP (v6) address (eg think lightbulbs, windows, clothes, vehicles, air conditioners, hand-held tools, watches, helmets etc, etc), then it becomes really very hard to properly secure most buildings and assets.
In a war situation, you'd have troops moving about literally in a sea of potentially deadly gizmos with consumer grade quality of processing power, but even in friendly territory, building a truly secure working military base could turn out to be a complicated problem and maybe not possible.
What if nobody remembers that the cement in building C is connected to the internet and the firmware hasn't been updated (far fetched? There might be tiny sensors mixed into the cement, to help maintenance crews monitor the building better...)
It's likely that in 10 or 20 years, viruses designed to create random damage would be really hard to protect against, because a 100% controlled environment would be really hard to keep, and even 1% vulnerability could be exploited in a war scenario.
Today computer security is a lot easier, because there are so *few* computer systems, mostly big boxes with a local admin who can secure them.
Uh-huh. The weapon is easy, convincing the enemy to add a weak point is the only snag.
Ooh! It's got waveforms! And algorithms!!
Okay, I'll assume that we infiltrate the enemy to attach an access point. Couldn't we just park a truck nearby and use a lower-power antenna? Or use an unsecured access point?
In other words, once.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Great points. That's pretty much where my thoughts were going.
People seem to be thinking this thorough as a parallel to what we think of as cyber attacks in the internet world today where viruses and trojans take control of our PCs for nefarious purposes. And while that may be desirable to the Navy too, everything in warfare is moving toward digital communications these days. There are a number of types of tactical data links, communicating virtually everything that one battlefield entity might need to know from another and it's only going to get more widespread over time.
You don't need to "take over" an enemy radar when you can just tell it to report whatever you want to its operator via spoofed waveforms. Or, if a good guy plane could fool others into thinking it was an enemy plane (with a spoofed radar signature, IFF, etc.), the benefits are obvious.
The difficulties are defeating encryption and decoding messages/waveforms to be able to inject specific bits of data as seen fit. Though, a targeted DoS attack is probably not very difficult to achieve even now because if you flood a link with messages of the appropriate size, it still has to do some processing to decide that it can't do anything with them, possibly slowing or stopping legitimate messages.
Incidentally, I work in defense and I don't see my company listed in TFA so that sucks because this would be an interesting project. Though, it might be involved in some way that I just don't know about (because it's a huge company, not necessarily because of secrecy or anything).