29 mars 2019 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense

DARPA Seeks to Make Scalable On-Chip Security Pervasive

For the past decade, cybersecurity threats have moved from high in the software stack to progressively lower levels of the computational hierarchy, working their way towards the underlying hardware. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has driven the creation of a rapidly growing number of accessible devices and a multitude of complex chip designs needed to enable them. With this rapid growth comes increased opportunity for economic and nation-state adversaries alike to shift their attention to chips that enable complex capabilities across commercial and defense applications. The consequences of a hardware cyberattack are significant as a compromise could potentially impact not millions, but billions of devices.

Despite growing recognition of the issue, there are no common tools, methods, or solutions for chip-level security currently in wide use. This is largely driven by the economic hurdles and technical trade-offs often associated with secure chip design. Incorporating security into chips is a manual, expensive, and cumbersome task that requires significant time and a level of expertise that is not readily available in most chip and system companies. The inclusion of security also often requires certain trade-offs with the typical design objectives, such as size, performance, and power dissipation. Further, modern chip design methods are unforgiving – once a chip is designed, adding security after the fact or making changes to address newly discovered threats is nearly impossible.

“Today, it can take six to nine months to design a modern chip, and twice as long if you want to make that same design secure,” said Serge Leef, a program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “While large merchant semiconductor companies are investing in in-house personnel to manually incorporate security into their high-volume silicon, mid-size chip companies, system houses, and start-ups with small design teams who create lower volume chips lack the resources and economic drivers to support the necessary investment in scalable security mechanisms, leaving a majority of today's chips largely unprotected.”

To ease the burden of developing secure chips, DARPA developed the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. AISS aims to automate the process of incorporating scalable defense mechanisms into chip designs, while allowing designers to explore economics versus security trade-offs and maximize design productivity. The objective of the program is to develop a design tool and IP ecosystem – which includes tool vendors, chip developers, IP licensers, and the open source community – that will allow security to be inexpensively incorporated into chip designs with minimal effort and expertise, ultimately making scalable on-chip security pervasive.

Leef continued, “The security, design, and economic objectives of a chip can vary based on its intended application. As an example, a chip design with extreme security requirements may have to accept certain tradeoffs. Achieving the required security level may cause the chip to become larger, consume more power, or deliver slower performance. Depending on the application, some or all of these tradeoffs may be acceptable, but with today's manual processes it's hard to determine where tradeoffs can be made.”

AISS seeks to create a novel, automated chip design flow that will allow the security mechanisms to scale consistently with the goals of the design. The design flow will provide a means of rapidly evaluating architectural alternatives that best address the required design and security metrics, as well as varying cost models to optimize the economics versus security tradeoff. The target AISS system – or system on chip (SoC) – will be automatically generated, integrated, and optimized to meet the objectives of the application and security intent. These systems will consist of two partitions – an application specific processor partition and a security partition implementing the on-chip security features. This approach is novel in that most systems today do not include a security partition due to its design complexity and cost of integration. By bringing greater automation to the chip design process, the burden of security inclusion can be profoundly decreased.

While the threat landscape is ever evolving and expansive, AISS seeks to address four specific attack surfaces that are most relevant to digital ASICs and SoCs. These include side channel attacks, reverse engineering attacks, supply chain attacks, and malicious hardware attacks. “Strategies for resisting threats vary widely in cost, complexity, and invasiveness. As such, AISS will help designers assess which defense mechanisms are most appropriate based on the potential attack surface and the likelihood of a compromise,” said Leef.

In addition to incorporating scalable defense mechanisms, AISS seeks to ensure that the IP blocks that make up the chip remain secure throughout the design process and are not compromised as they move through the ecosystem. As such, the program will also aim to move forward provenance and integrity validation techniques for preexisting design components by advancing current methods or inventing novel technical approaches. These techniques may include IP watermarking and threat detection to help validate the chip's integrity and IP provenance throughout its lifetime.

AISS is part of the second phase of DARPA's Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) – a five-year, upwards of $1.5 billion investment in the future of domestic, U.S. government, and defense electronics systems. Under ERI Phase II, DARPA is exploring the development of trusted electronics components, including the advancement of electronics that can enforce security and privacy protections. AISS will help address this mission through its efforts to enable scalable on-chip security.

DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on April 10, 2019 at the DARPA Conference Center, located at 675 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia 22203, to provide more information about AISS and answer questions from potential proposers. For details about the event, including registration requirements, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=6770487d820ee13f33af67b0980a7d73&tab=core&_cview=0

Additional information will be available in the forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement, which will be posted to www.fbo.gov.

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-03-25

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10 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial

India Prepares For New Fighter Tender
by Reuben F. Johnson While it is hard to believe, next year will mark almost 15 years since the Indian Air Force (IAF) embarked on a process to procure a new fighter. It will also be eight years since the force selected the Dassault Rafale for its Medium-Multirole Combat Aircraft (M-MRCA) program—a selection that was eventually not carried through to a license-production run as originally planned. The M-MRCA effort was planned for a procurement of 126 fighters by the IAF with an option for 63 additional units. All but 18 of these aircraft were to be license-assembled in India on a Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) production line. In 2012, India eventually selected the Dassault Rafale from a competition that included Russia's Mikoyan MiG-35, the Saab JAS-39E from Sweden, the Eurofighter, and both the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and a developed version of the Lockheed Martin F-16. The latter two are U.S. products. REPLACEMENT CRISIS However, in “winning a competition” such as this, a French industry official told AIN, “you do not really ‘win' anything. What you supposedly win is the right to then sit down and negotiate a contract—and if you cannot come to some agreement, then you get nothing after having spent tens of millions [of dollars] for all the years it takes to bid a major program in a place like India.” By 2015 the two sides had not come to an agreement on localized production, and in 2016 the new government of prime minister Narendra Modi ordered 36 Rafales “off-the-shelf,” the first of which has already been officially handed over to India. Seven of the aircraft should be delivered to the IAF between April and May 2020. This, however, still leaves the force woefully short of the force levels it says are needed to meet New Delhi's national security requirements. There is still no suitable replacement for the older (but modernized) MiG-21 Bison aircraft in service. There is also no solution to address the gap created by the 2018 Indian decision to withdraw from the HAL/Sukhoi joint program with Russia for a Future Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) program. India was to have purchased 127 of this aircraft, which would have been a heavily-modified version of the Sukhoi Su-57. After an IAF inspection of one of the program's prototypes, the force was calling for 43 major changes to the design to correct what it saw as deficiencies with the original configuration. VERSION 2.0 The consequence is that India—after some twists and turns—is on a path to issue another tender for what will be at least 100 of some aircraft to fill the void created by these developments. Originally, the program was to have been a competition for only single-engine airplane designs, which would have limited the competition to the JAS-39 and the F-16. The latter has now been re-christened the “F-21,” due to all of the changes that have been made to the design to accommodate Indian requirements. One of the changes was to add a probe-and-drogue refueling option in addition to the traditional USAF flying boom refueling method. This “single-engine only” competition was then widened to allow all of the twin-engine aircraft that participated in the original M-MRCA tender—with Russia's Sukhoi Su-35 now also thrown into the mix. This has prompted more than one observer to dub the still-officially unannounced re-running of the tender as “M-MRCA ver 2.0.” NEEDED: A SHORTER ACQUISITION CYCLE What makes this impending competition all the more critical for India's future defense posture is that the next-generation of aircraft carriers that will be coming online with the Indian Navy that will require a force of CATOBAR (catapult-assisted take-off barrier-arrested recovery) fighter aircraft. Both the Rafale-M and Boeing's Super Hornet are available for this mission and Saab has a design for a carrier-capable Maritime Gripen variant of the JAS-39E on the shelf that can be realized within a short time frame. What remains to be seen is whether or not a new tender can be carried out without making it a repeat of the arduous seven-year process that the original M-MRCA turned out to be. Suggestions had been made last year that a new tender could be carried out without an extensive set of flight trials to shorten the evaluation and down-select cycles. While there is no agreement on which aircraft type or types fit the requirements of both the IAF and the Indian Navy, there are numerous observers both inside and outside of India who disparage the manner in which the selection of a new fighter type has been carried out. “As it stands now, the methodology for buying a new fighter is an objectively dysfunctional process,” said one Indian aerospace expert. “The problem is that it will never change as long as the OEMs keep rewarding those who propagate that process without demanding that it change.” https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2020-02-06/india-prepares-new-fighter-tender
11 juin 2018 | International, Aérospatial

South Korea to reboot training helicopter acquisition
By: Jeff Jeong SEOUL, South Korea ― The South Korean military's long-sought purchase of training helicopters has been ruptured due to price issues, prompting the arms procurement agency to prepare a rebidding process for the aircraft acquisition project code-named TH-X. Bell (formerly Bell Helicopter) and Leonardo Helicopters were competing for the $155 million project to procure 41 training helicopters both for the South Korean Army and the Navy, according to the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, or DAPA. “The TH-X selection, originally due late last year, has been delayed, and a bidder failed to meet some of the TH-X requirements,” DAPA spokesman Kang Hwan-seok said. “As the TH-X acquisition is a competition basis, we're scheduled to proceed with a rebidding soon.” Multiple industry sources said the TH-X negotiations broke down mainly because of cost concerns. “Bidding price was an issue, but there are some other reasons, too,” Kang said, adding his agency would issue a request for proposals again between June and July. He declined to elaborate further. The South Korean military has sought to introduce new training helicopters to replace the older fleet of MD 500s, which have been operational for more than 30 years. The DAPA issued an RFP for the TH-X in November 2015. Bell offered its new 505 Jet Ranger light helicopter, which successfully completed its first flight in November 2014, while Leonardo suggested its SW-4 light single-engine multirole helicopter produced its Polish subsidiary PZL Swidnik. Both companies are expected to participate in the TH-X retender, according to DAPA officials. https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2018/06/01/south-korea-to-reboot-training-helicopter-acquisition/
13 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR

New Swedish government advocates for greater defense spending
By: Gerard O'Dwyer STOCKHOLM — The Swedish military can expect to see a sizable increase in its annual budget regardless of the composition of the new government that will be formed in the wake of parliamentary elections. All of the mainstream parties, including the ruling Social Democrats (SDP), the Moderates, the Center, Liberals and the Sweden Democrats' right-wing nationalist party, campaigned on delivering a stronger national defense and channeling a much higher level of spending to the Swedish Armed Forces over the next 10 years. "Sweden needs a more resilient national defense capability that is better funded and resourced," said Stefan Löfven, the SDP's leader and Sweden's prime minister. The SDP is hoping to assemble a new government in partnership with the Leftist and Green parties. These three parties secured a 40.8 percent share of the popular vote in the recently concluded September 2018 election. Löfven's main challenge is the center-right Alliance group, which includes the Moderates, the Center, Liberals and Christian Democrats. Together, the four Alliance parties won 40.3 percent of the popular vote. The Alliance is looking to form a new government that excludes both the SDP and the Sweden Democrats. The Sweden Democrats raised its share of the popular vote to 17.6 percent. All mainstream parties have ruled out forming a coalition that includes the Sweden Democrats. Defense will be very much on the minds of Sweden's new government, against a backdrop of an unpredictable Russia and a domestic military that is unable to either fund major new procurement programs or work within the tight parameters of the current budgeting framework. By: Aaron Mehta “Sweden's national defense has been neglected for decades. What has happened is shameful. The budget allocated to the armed forces must reflect needs, operational realities and the requirement to replace outdated equipment. The goal should be to raise spending on defense to 2 percent of GDP, the recommended NATO level, inside 10 years,” said Ulf Kristersson, leader of the Moderates and someone being widely tipped to become Sweden's next prime minister. The Alliance supports a more ambitious spending plan for the military that would increase the armed forces' budget by $2.3 billion in the 2019-2021 budgetary period. “The [Swedish Armed Forces] needs to be able to afford to run essential equipment-replacement programs. We need more Army brigades, more fighter aircraft, and among other things an increased cyber defense capacity,” Kristersson said. Restoring the military's budget and finances to levels that actually reflect the force's capability requirements will take time. The organization's budget has been in decline since the Cold War era of 1963, when defense spending amounted to 3.68 percent of Sweden's gross domestic product. Spending as a ratio of GDP had dropped to 1.1 percent by 2015. It currently stands at about 1.03 percent, a historic low. A force development plan endorsed by the armed forces favors an increase in annual spending on defense to between $7.36 billion and $9 billion by 2025. In the longer term, and by the year 2035, the military would like to see defense spending rise to more than $12.1 billion. At the same time, the Swedish Armed Forces would be strengthened from the current 50,000 personnel of all ranks to 120,000 by the year 2035. This proposed new look, improved capability and reinforced organization would comprise at least four brigade-level units, a light infantry special forces regiment, a fleet of 24 surface combat naval vessels and six submarines, eight fighter squadrons, and 120 Gripen combat aircraft. Stefan Löfven's SDP-led government adopted new measures in 2017 to increase annual spending on the military from about $4.7 billion to $6.6 billion by 2019. Under the spending plan supported by the Alliance, defense expenditure would grow year on year after 2019, reaching $8 billion by 2024. Full article: https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2018/09/12/new-swedish-government-advocates-for-greater-defense-spending

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