Statement from the Commander 1 Canadian Air Division

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  27 janvier 2021 | Local, Aérospatial

  MBDA to arm Hellenic Air Force’s new Rafale fighter jets

  January 25, 2021 - Lieutenant General Theodoros Lagios, General Director for Defence Investments and Armaments of the Greek Ministry of Defence and Eric Béranger, CEO of MBDA, today signed a contract to provide the armaments for 18 Rafale combat aircraft intended for Greece's air force. A signing ceremony was held in Athens in the presence of the French Minister for Armed Forces, Florence Parly, and the Greek Minister for Defense, Nikolaos Panagiotopoulos. The new aircraft's weapons will benefit from the strong commonality with those from the Mirage 2000s and Mirage 2000-5s currently in service in the Hellenic Air Force. Like these, the Rafales will be armed with SCALP cruise missiles, AM39 Exocet anti-ship missiles and MICA multi-mission air-to-air missiles. Additionally, MBDA will also supply Meteor beyond visual range air-to-air missiles. Eric Béranger, CEO of MBDA, said: “The signing of this agreement turns a new page in our relationship with Greece, which we have had for more than half a century. The country was the very first customer of the Exocet missile in 1968, showing great confidence in it and in our predecessor companies. This confidence has been renewed over the years and is being renewed again today. It is our duty to do everything we can in order to continue delivering on this confidence into tomorrow. View source version on MBDA: https://www.mbda-systems.com/press-releases/mbda-to-arm-hellenic-air-forces-new-rafale-fighter-jets/

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  5 août 2019 | Local, Sécurité

  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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  25 octobre 2018 | Local, Aérospatial

  An Investment in Capability

  If you're planning to become hopelessly lost, my advice is to do it in Norway. That was the author's conclusion after Skies was invited to the Leonardo Helicopters facility in Yeovil, England, to fly the latest variant of the AW101 search and rescue (SAR) helicopter. The machine was brand new, pending delivery to Norway, but represented a configuration that Leonardo has proposed to the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) as an upgrade for Canada's fleet of CH-149 Cormorant SAR helicopters. AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE RCAF The CH-149 Cormorant entered RCAF service in 2002. While not an old airframe by Canadian standards, the subsequent evolution of the model has left our version somewhat dated, and Leonardo maintains that obsolescence issues are beginning to adversely affect operational availability Team Cormorant is an industry consortium composed of Leonardo Helicopters, IMP Aerospace & Defence, CAE, GE Canada and Rockwell Collins Canada. The group's unsolicited proposal to the Air Force is intended to guard against creeping obsolescence and ultimately to reduce the cost of operating the helicopter. Under Team Cormorant's proposal, the RCAF would also acquire a training facility with a modern full-mission simulator, likely to be installed at 19 Wing Comox, B.C. The machine on offer to Canada is an extensively upgraded version of the RCAF's existing airframe, based upon the AW101-612 configuration; 16 of which are destined for Norway under its Norwegian All-Weather SAR Helicopter (NAWSARH) program. Team Cormorant's proposal to Canada also seeks to take advantage of nine former VH-71 Kestrel airframes from the cancelled U.S. presidential helicopter program, acquired by the RCAF in 2011. These would be used to augment the Cormorant fleet from the current 14–widely acknowledged as inadequate for Canadian SAR requirements–up to potentially 21 machines. Enhanced fleet size would allow the RCAF to base the Cormorant at 8 Wing Trenton, Ont.; a move that would improve SAR capability in the vast Trenton SAR region. Compared to in-service CH-149 Cormorants, the upgrades on offer include new, more powerful, full-authority digital electronic-controlled (FADEC) General Electric CT7-8E turboshaft engines; a more modern Rockwell Collins cockpit and avionics suite; improved aircraft management system; and a newly designed, four-axis dual-duplex digital automatic flight control system (AFCS). The sensor package promises the biggest capability upgrade, and includes an electro-optical surveillance system; a multi-mode active electronically-scanned array (AESA) radar; cell phone detection and tracking system; and marine automatic identification system (AIS) transponder receiver. AN OPPORTUNITY FOR COMPARISON In 2016, Skies dispatched me to fly the CH-149 Cormorant with RCAF's 442 Squadron at CFB Comox. It was an opportunity for this former Air Force CH-113/A Labrador SAR pilot to see first-hand how the Cormorant had changed the job I did decades ago in those same mountains. I recall that the Cormorant brought a lot of new technology to the SAR business, but the basic mission, like the mountains around us, was unchanged. After that flight, I reported: “Flying SAR was still a matter of cautious and skillful flying, using maps and looking out the window.” That experience left me with great regard for Air Force SAR crews and for the operational capability of the Cormorant, but also bemused to find that the business of searching still basically relied upon the “Mark 1 eyeball.” A flight in the latest variant of the AW101 was a terrific opportunity for a more contemporary comparison. The experience would demonstrate that leading-edge systems–particularly electro-optic sensor technologies–offer SAR capabilities that are as much a generational improvement over the current Cormorant as the Cormorant was over my beloved ol' Labrador. A CANADIAN FLIES A NORWEGIAN HELICOPTER IN ENGLAND Leonardo Helicopters test pilot Richard “Russ” Grant kindly offered me the right seat for our demonstration flight. Veteran flight test engineer (FTE) Andy Cotton served as sensor operator. Conditions were ideal, under a clear sky with a warm (24 C) gentle breeze along the century-old former-Westlands grass runway. Our test helicopter was the sixth production machine destined for Norway, operated by Leonardo under U.K. Ministry of Defence registration ZZ015. The helicopter's empty weight was 11,039 kilograms with much of its SAR interior yet to be fitted. Adding 2,000 kilograms of fuel (roughly half its 4,150-kilogram capacity) and three crewmembers brought the takeoff mass to 13,517 kilograms, which was well below the maximum allowable gross weight of 15,600 kilograms. The Cormorant that Skies flew with RCAF's 442 Squadron, although fully equipped for SAR with a standard fuel load of 2,400 kilograms and a crew of six, had a gross takeoff mass of 13,800 kilograms, which was below the maximum allowable gross weight of 14,600 kilograms. Direct comparison is difficult to establish, but the Norwegian machine is both heavier with installed systems and has more installed power than the CH-149, so the net result may be expected to be about the same operational power margin. Rapid dispatch can be facilitated by starting the auxiliary power unit (APU) while strapping in. Grant talked me through the engine starting procedure from memory. Air Force crews will use a checklist, but the procedure was quick and straightforward Engine controls consisted of three rotary knobs on the overhead panel in place of engine condition levers. I monitored the start, but Grant advised that in the event of a start-up malfunction the FADEC would shut down the engine faster than the pilots could react. We started the No. 1 engine first to power the accessory drive, providing hydraulic and electric power and bleed air. Starts of engines No. 2 and No. 3 were done simultaneously. Pre-flight checks and initialization of the aircraft management system (AMS, but think “master computer”) took Grant only minutes. Despite the functional similarity of the cockpit to the CH-149, the impression that I was amidst unfamiliar new technology was immediate. As ground crews pulled the chocks and busied themselves around the helicopter, the onboard Obstacle Proximity LIDAR System (OPLS, where LIDAR is light detection and ranging, since I needed to ask, too) annunciated their presence around the turning rotors. This system, which Grant described as being like the parking sensors in a car, provided a pop-up display and discretely-pitched audio cues depicting the range and azimuth to obstacles around the helicopter. Having come from a generation where we squinted into a landing light beam to guesstimate rotor clearance from obstacles, all I can say is, I want one! Full article: https://www.skiesmag.com/features/an-investment-in-capability