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The F-35's Greatest Vulnerability Isn't Enemy Weapons. It's Being Hacked. (popularmechanics.com)

schwit1 shares a report: Every F-35 squadron, no matter the country, has a 13-server ALIS package that is connected to the worldwide ALIS network. Individual jets send logistical data back to their nation's Central Point of Entry, which then passes it on to Lockheed's central server hub in Fort Worth, Texas. In fact, ALIS sends back so much data that some countries are worried it could give away too much information about their F-35 operations. Another networking system is the Joint Reprogramming Enterprise, or JRE. The JRE maintains a shared library of potential adversary sensors and weapon systems that is distributed to the worldwide F-35 fleet. For example, the JRE will seek out and share information on enemy radar and electronic warfare signals so that individual air forces will not have to track down the information themselves. This allows countries with the F-35 to tailor the mission around anticipated threats -- and fly one step ahead of them.

Although the networks have serious cybersecurity protections, they will undoubtedly be targets for hackers in times of peace, and war. Hackers might try to bring down the networks entirely, snarling the worldwide logistics system and even endangering the ability of individual aircraft to get much-needed spare parts. Alternately, it might be possible to compromise the integrity of the ALIS data -- by, say, reporting a worldwide shortage of F-35 engines. Hackers could conceivably introduce bad data in the JRE that could compromise the safety of a mission, shortening the range of a weapon system so that a pilot thinks she is safely outside the engagement zone when she is most certainly not. Even the F-35 simulators that train pilots could conceivably leak data to an adversary. Flight simulators are programmed to mirror flying a real aircraft as much as possible, so data retrieved from a simulator will closely follow the data from a real F-35.

2 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Power Mac G4s in the Sky. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's more or less a PowerPC G4 right down to the Firewire bus.

    Components were billed as "COTS". However those chips were still back when they were Motorola/Freescale

    The system departed from the historical use of low speed Mil-Std-1553B busses, using the high speed Fibre Channel-Avionics Environment (FC-AE) serial bus for high speed internal interconnects.

    built around PowerPC RISC processors - essentially a bigger and faster cousin to the 6U VME packaged PowerPC processors now being used in F-15E, F/A-18E/F and F-111C Block C-4.

    "So we have designed for technology refresh, so at the appropriate time we can stop putting in the 1 GHz processor board and swap out to the 2 GHz board without having to go back and do any redesign. We were once required to use a MIL-STD-1760 processor with Ada or other military languages; now we use commercial PowerPC with C++."

    http://www.ausairpower.net/APA...

    https://www.militaryaerospace....

  2. Re:That's two wring guesses. Try again by sconeu · · Score: 3, Informative

    Mulitple languages... Ada for sure, and also C++, and probably others.

    C++ coding standards for JSF. http://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

    --
    General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.