October 29, 2021 | Local, Naval
Des sous-marins nucléaires français au Canada ?
Un dossier important sur le bureau de la nouvelle ministre de la Défense Anita Anand.
November 19, 2019 | Local, Aerospace
Boeing pitches guarantee of billions of dollars of work for Canadian firms if its Super Hornet is picked by Canada
DAVID PUGLIESE, OTTAWA CITIZEN
U.S. aerospace giant Boeing is pitching its guarantee of billions of dollars of work for Canadian companies as well as keeping aircraft maintenance in country as it tries to convince the Liberal government to select a new version of the Super Hornet fighter jet.
Boeing is hoping that new technology on the Super Hornet and its commitment to place as much as $30 billion of work with Canadian firms will result in it winning the competition to build 88 jets.
The move comes as the NDP and aerospace unions are becoming more vocal about the need for Canada's fighter jet replacement project to pay major dividends for the economy.
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said last week he would be pushing that issue when Parliament returns and he hopes to have a discussion with the Liberal's new defence minister about how Canadian jobs can be created and sustained by the program.
Boeing had been non-committal to the Canadian program as it reviewed the bidding requirements throughout the summer. But that changed last week when Boeing confirmed it was in the race.
“We wouldn't be having this conversation if we didn't think we had a very realistic chance of winning,” Boeing executive Jim Barnes said in an interview with this newspaper.
Lockheed Martin's F-35 stealth fighter is considered the top contender in the project that will see the purchase of new jets at a cost of between $15 billion and $19 billion. Saab of Sweden is also in the competition, offering the Gripen fighter jet.
The issue of guaranteed economic benefits for Canada could be a problem for the Liberal government, which under pressure from the U.S., changed the procurement rules to allow the F-35 to be considered. Because of the way the U.S.-led F-35 program is structured, Lockheed Martin cannot provide guarantees of any work for Canadian firms, a stance that in the past would have disqualified a company from bidding on a major defence acquisition.
In early September, the union representing machinists in the aerospace industry warned that the changes made for Lockheed Martin would come at the expense of other firms offering guaranteed work for Canada's aerospace sector. In addition, the union is worried that if Canada were to purchase the F-35 then most of the key maintenance would be done in the U.S., putting in jeopardy 600 jobs at L-3 in Mirabel, Que. L-3 conducts maintenance on the Royal Canadian Air Force's current CF-18 fighter fleet.
Barnes said Boeing was surprised about the change in the Canadian competition that lifted the need for guarantees on providing domestic firms with work equal to, or more than, the cost of the project. Boeing has L-3 on its fighter jet team as well as Peraton Canada Corp., CAE Inc., GE Canada and Raytheon Canada.
Barnes said over the years the Canadian government has built up a capability to maintain its fighter jets at home by using those companies. “So we are leveraging that investment by the government of Canada,” he added.
Boeing officials say they are confident in guaranteeing billions of dollars of work for Canadians as the company has an extensive presence in both military and commercial aerospace around the world as well as its own facilities in Canada.
Lockheed Martin has countered that while there are no guarantees of work on the F-35 program, Canadian firms have picked up more than $1.3 billion in contracts on the project over the last 12 years. The amount of those contracts could significantly increase as more F-35s are delivered to the U.S. and Canada's allies, Lockheed Martin officials have noted.
Boeing is offering what is known as the Block 111 Super Hornet, an advanced version of the existing aircraft.
Earlier this year the U.S. Navy confirmed it is purchasing 78 of the aircraft which are equipped with a new computer, sensors and data links to boost the amount of information that can be received or transmitted. The aircraft also has satellite communications, which is important for Arctic operations, Boeing noted. Some stealth aspects have also been added and Boeing says it has been able to increase the life of the aircraft from 6,000 flight hours to 10,000 flight hours.
It is also pitching the new Super Hornet as less costly to maintain. The aircraft costs about $18,000 U.S. an hour to operate compared to the F-35 which costs $44,000 U.S.
The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin are working on reducing that F-35 cost.
Bids for the Canadian program must be submitted by the spring of 2020, and the winner is expected to be determined by early 2022. The first aircraft would be delivered by 2025.
Technical merit will make up the bulk of the assessment at 60 per cent. Cost and economic benefits companies can provide to Canada will each be worth 20 per cent.
A trade dispute between Canada and Boeing over duties on Canadian-made civilian passenger jets prompted the Liberals to include in the fighter jet competition a clause that would consider any economic harm a company has done to Canada.
Barnes said that clause is in the bidding documents. Boeing, however, does not see that as a problem for the company as it ultimately lost the trade dispute.
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August 5, 2019 | Local, Security
Hacker Community to Take on DARPA Hardware Defenses at DEF CON 2019
This month, DARPA will bring a demonstration version of a secure voting ballot box equipped with hardware defenses in development on the System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program to the DEF CON 2019 Voting Machine Hacking Village (Voting Village). The SSITH program is developing methodologies and design tools that enable the use of hardware advances to protect systems against software exploitation of hardware vulnerabilities. To evaluate progress on the program, DARPA is incorporating the secure processors researchers are developing into a secure voting ballot box and turning the system loose for public assessment by thousands of hackers and DEF CON community members. Many of today's hardware defenses cover very specific instances or vulnerabilities, leaving much open to attack or compromise. Instead of tackling individual instances, SSITH researchers are building defenses that address classes of vulnerabilities. In particular, SSITH is tackling seven vulnerabilities classes identified by the NIST Common Weakness Enumeration Specification (CWE), which span exploitation of permissions and privilege in the system architectures, memory errors, information leakage, and code injection. “There are a whole set of cyber vulnerabilities that happen in electronic systems that are at their core due to hardware vulnerabilities – or vulnerabilities that hardware could block,” said Dr. Linton Salmon, the program manager leading SSITH. “Current efforts to provide electronic security largely rely on robust software development and integration, utilizing an endless cycle of developing and deploying patches to the software firewall without addressing the underlying hardware vulnerability. The basic concept around SSITH is to make hardware a more significant participant in cybersecurity, rather than relegating system security only to software.” Under the SSITH program, researchers are exploring a number of different design approaches that go well beyond patching. These include using metadata tagging to detect unauthorized system access; employing formal methods to reason about integrated circuit systems and guarantee the accuracy of security characteristics; and combining hardware performance counters (HPCs) with machine learning to detect attacks and establish protective fences within the hardware. One team from the University of Michigan is developing a novel security approach that changes the unspecified semantics of a system every 50 milliseconds. Currently, attackers continuously probe a system to locate these undefined sections and, over time, are able to create a system map to identify possible hacks. By changing the construct every 50 milliseconds, attackers do not have enough time to find those weaknesses or develop an accurate representation of the system as a whole. To evaluate the hardware security concepts in development on the SSITH program, DARPA – working with Galois – is pursuing a voting system evaluation effort to provide a demonstration system that facilitates open challenges. The program elected to use a voting system as its demonstration platform to provide researchers with an accessible application that can be evaluated in an open forum. Further, the topic of election system security has become an increasingly critical area of concern for the hacker and security community, as well as the United States more broadly. “DARPA focuses on creating technologies to enhance national defense, and election system security falls within that remit. Eroding trust in the election process is a threat to the very fabric of our democracy,” noted Salmon. While protecting democracy is a critical national defense issue, SSITH is not trying to solve all issues with election system security nor is it working to provide a specific solution to use during elections. “We expect the voting booth demonstrator to provide tools, concepts, and ideas that the election enterprise can use to increase security, however, our true aim is to improve security for all electronic systems. This includes election equipment, but also defense systems, commercial devices, and beyond,” said Salmon. During DEF CON 2019, the SSITH voting system demonstrator will consist of a set of RISC-V processors that the research teams will modify to include their SSITH security features. These processors will be mounted on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and incorporated into a secure ballot box. Hackers will have access to the system via an Ethernet port as well as a USB port, through which they can load software or other attacks to challenge the SSITH hardware. Since SSITH's research is still in the early stages, only two prototype versions of the 15 processors in development will be available for evaluation. “At this year's Voting Village, hackers may find issues with the processors and quite frankly we would consider that a success. We want to be transparent about the technologies we are creating and find any problems in these venues before the technology is placed in another venue where a compromise could be more dangerous,” said Salmon. Following DEF CON 2019, the voting system evaluation effort will go on a university roadshow where additional cybersecurity experts will have an opportunity to further analyze and hack the technology. In 2020, DARPA plans to return to DEF CON with an entire voting system, which will incorporate fixes to the issues discovered during the previous year's evaluation efforts. The 2020 demonstrator will use the STAR-Vote system architecture, which is a documented, open source architecture that includes a system of microprocessors for the voting booth, ballot box, and other components. It also includes a verifiable paper ballot, providing both digital and physical representations of the votes cast within the booth. “While the 2020 demonstrator will provide a better representation of the full attack surface, the exercise will not result in a deployable voting system. To aid in the advancement of secure election equipment as well as electronic systems more broadly, the hardware design approaches and techniques developed during the SSITH program will be made available to the community as open-source items,” concluded Salmon. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-08-01
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February 18, 2019 | Local, Aerospace
First two used Australian fighter jets arrive in Canada on Sunday
DAVID PUGLIESE, OTTAWA CITIZEN The Royal Canadian Air Force will be showing off its first two used Australian fighter jets on Sunday at 4 Wing Cold Lake in Alberta. Representatives from the Royal Australian Air Force and the RCAF will mark the arrival of the F-18 jets that morning. Only local media have been invited to cover the event. The aircraft will be used to bolster the RCAF's CF-18 fleet. Pat Finn, assistant deputy minister for materiel at the Department of National Defence, told Postmedia in a recent interview that he expected the first two jets in the spring but there was hope they could arrive earlier. The two aircraft will be prepared for flying as quickly as possible. “I would say it could be by the summer the first couple are on the flight line and painted with the maple leaf,” Finn said. A second group of planes would arrive later this year. Eighteen of the Australian F-18 aircraft will eventually be flying for the Canadian Forces, while another seven will be used for testing and spare parts. Canada is paying Australia $90 million for the aircraft. The federal government originally estimated the purchase of the Australian jets would cost around $500 million, but Finn said that price reflected every aspect of the associated deal, not just the cost of purchasing the jets. Canada is also acquiring extra spare parts, the Australian jets will have to be outfitted with specific Canadian equipment and software and testing will be needed. The $500-million project estimate also included $50 million in contingency funds to cover any problems and another $35 million for the salaries of all civilian and military personnel involved over the life of the project. An additional $30 million will be spent on new infrastructure needed to accommodate the aircraft. Those costs add up to $360 million, Finn said. But DND also plans to upgrade its existing fleet of CF-18s with new communications gear and equipment required to meet regulations to operate in civilian airspace, improvements which the Australian jets will also eventually receive at a cost of around $110 million, an amount that brought the original estimate to nearly $500 million. The Liberal government had planned to buy 18 new Super Hornet fighter jets from U.S. aerospace giant Boeing to augment the Royal Canadian Air Force's CF-18s until new aircraft can be purchased in the coming years. But in 2017 Boeing complained to the U.S. Commerce Department that Canadian subsidies for Quebec-based Bombardier allowed it to sell its C-series civilian passenger aircraft in the U.S. at cut-rate prices. As a result, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump enacted a tariff of almost 300 per cent against the Bombardier aircraft sold in the U.S. In retaliation, Canada cancelled the deal to buy the 18 Super Hornets, which would have cost more than US$5 billion. Instead of buying the new Super Hornets, the Liberals decided to acquire the used Australian jets. Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has said the extra jets are needed to deal with a “capability gap,” as Canada does not have enough fighters to handle its commitments to NATO as well as protecting North America. But Conservative MPs say the capability gap doesn't exist and was concocted by the government to delay a larger project to buy new jets, a competition that might end up selecting the F-35 stealth fighter that during the 2015 election campaign the Liberals vowed never to purchase. In the fall of 2016, then-Royal Canadian Air Force commander Lt.-Gen. Mike Hood told senators that the Liberal government brought in a policy change which required the RCAF to be able to meet both its NATO and North American air defence commitments at the same time. That, in turn, created the capability gap, he said. Hood said he was not told about the reasons for the policy change. In November 2018 Auditor General Michael Ferguson issued a report noting that the purchase of the extra aircraft would not fix the fundamental weaknesses with the CF-18 fleet which is the aircraft's declining combat capability and a shortage of pilots and maintenance personnel. “The Australian F/A-18s will need modifications and upgrades to allow them to fly until 2032,” the report said. “These modifications will bring the F/A-18s to the same level as the CF-18s but will not improve the CF-18's combat capability.” “In our opinion, purchasing interim aircraft does not bring National Defence closer to consistently meeting the new operational requirement introduced in 2016,” the report added. The Canadian Forces says it is bringing in new initiatives to boost the numbers of pilots and maintenance staff. https://montrealgazette.com/news/national/defence-watch/first-two-used-australian-fighter-jets-arrive-in-canada-on-sunday/