Nouvelles

By: Adam Stone With incredible volumes of material on the move – think: arms and munitions, supplies, vehicles – the military quite simply needs a better way to track its stuff. “We hear a lot of concerns about getting in-transit visibility in the last tactical mile, from the supply point to the end user,” said Jim Alexander, product lead for automated movement and identification solutions in PEO EIS – Enterprise Information Systems. “We are working with our partners and with transportation command to gather up the requirements for the next generation of in-transit visibility for DoD.” At the heart of transit tracking today is radio-frequency identification (RFID), which allows logisticians to tag and track goods on the move. But RFID has its limitations: It's infrastructure intensive and not globally available. Military planners are looking to do better. Falling short RFID technology took a big step forward about 20 years ago with the widespread adoption of “active RFID.” Rather than scan individual items by hand, active RFID uses a fixed scanner to monitor entire lots. You'll see this equipment at airports and at the gates of military installations. But active RFID isn't an ideal solution. “It consists of a dome-shaped reader on a pole, connected to power and ethernet. So you are running power lines and communication lines, and if the reader goes down someone has to go out and physically service it,” said Rosemary Johnston, senior vice president of government at solutions provider Savi. The company is sole provider for the DoD's RFID-IV contract, which has a $102 million ceiling. “Each reader costs a couple of thousand dollars, plus the cost of hooking it up, running wires via trenches. It becomes a major construction investment project,” said Johnston, a former chief master sergeant with the U.S. Air Force. In addition, active RFID equipment isn't necessarily well-suited to today's highly agile expeditionary fighting style. “The military doesn't know where the next fight is going to be, so they use portable deployment kits rather than do this massive construction, but even those are heavy ― the lightest weighs 25 pounds ― and they require good satellite coverage. It becomes very resource constrained,” she said. With the next-gen RFID contract, the military envisions a better way of doing business. A cellular solution Satellite-readable RFID tags offer some relief, as they expand the military's reach without requiring extensive additional overhead. But satellite time is costly. Savi's emerging solution would leverage widely available cellular signals as a new means to capture and communicate RFID information. Johnston describes early trials of cellular RFID in Africa, where materials tracking has been a perennial problem. U.S. and European forces have just six fixed RFID readers on the entire continent, making supplemental coverage an urgent need, she said. “We have used cellular technology in Africa with a commercial company very successfully for the past three or four years. The networks we would use on the military side would be very similar to what this commercial customer uses, so we believe that represents a great opportunity for Africa Command,” she said. The switch to cellular isn't technically complicated: military planners would need to add a cellular module to the existing RFID tag. That module could then be programmed to automatically report location status to the military's in-transit visibility server. High-value cargo might report hourly, whereas more mundane supplies could be set to check in daily or every couple of days, in order to conserve battery life in the RFID tag. At PEO-EIS, Alexander said he sees strong potential in the technology. With a cellular system, “you could get a much more granular look, a more detailed look at where my stuff is,” as compared to relying on fixed checkpoints, he said. “If you have sensitive cargo you can know where it is every hour on the hour, as opposed to waiting for that cargo to pass by a fixed site.” Some technical details still need to be worked out in order to implement a commercial-grade cellular solution within the military. For example, “you don't want to have anything in the device that would trigger a static charge if you are working around ammunition,” Johnston noted. “We are working through that process right now.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/09/04/next-gen-rfid-could-improve-how-vehicles-get-to-the-battlefield

By: Adam Stone As Navy Cyber Security Division director, Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett casts a wary eye over the rising importance of data as a weapon of war. Data is an ever-more-critical battlefield asset, given the rising internet of things, including a rapidly growing inventory of unmanned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets across the Navy. Protecting all that data from enemy exploitation represents a potentially massive cyber challenge. This spring, the Navy announced “Compile to Combat in 24 Hours,” a pilot project to leverage web services and a new cloud architecture in the service of data security. C4ISRNET's Adam Stone spoke to Barrett about the potential there, and about the emerging IT security landscape in a data-centric military. C4ISRNET: Data has become increasingly valuable, especially in terms of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. How valuable is it? How do you describe the significance of data these days? REAR ADM. DANELLE BARRETT: If you look at what goes on in industry and how they use big data for decision making, to be predictive and proactive: that's exactly the kind of environment that we want to get to. Being able to trust those data, to access the data, expose the data, reuse the data — that becomes actually the hardest part. C4ISRNET: Let's talk about that. Sharing data involves risk. Talk about that risk landscape. BARRETT: The more data that you have out there and the more places you have it, obviously you have an increased attack surface. Adversaries will go after your data to try to get an advantage. So, you want to protect data down to the lowest layer and you want to make sure that you have defense in depth built in, and resiliency to be able to work through any kind of attack or interruption in your data flow. We build our architectures around being resilient using the NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] model of “detect, react and restore.” You build in as much resiliency as you can. C4ISRNET: Can you say, specifically, how that's done? BARRETT: I'll give you an example of something that we're testing in our architecture to try to improve the data down to the data element layer. We have an effort called “Compile to Combat in 24 Hours.” We're looking at modernizing our afloat architecture and, as we do that, we're decomposing big monolithic applications, if you will, into web services similar to what you'd get on an iPhone: smaller capabilities, smaller web services as opposed to these big monolithic applications. As you do that, you can ensure that you're using standard ports and protocols, so you don't have applications on the ship that are reaching back over nonstandard ports, which would present an increased attack surface. If you can standardize on your ports, you can sense those better and monitor those better. Then you then go down to the data element layer. Say you standardize on extensible markup language, XML, you can then apply the SAML protocol that is inherent to that to protect your data at that lowest layer. We're testing that concept in an architecture now. Full article: https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/08/31/the-rising-importance-of-data-as-a-weapon-of-war/

By: Kelsey Atherton Drones are everywhere in the Pentagon today. While unpeopled vehicles are most closely associated with the Air Force and targeted killing campaigns, remotely controlled robots are in every branch of the military and used across all combatant commands. The fiscal year 2018 defense authorization contained the largest budget for drones and robots across the services ever, a sign of just how much of modern warfare involves these machines. Which is perhaps why, when the Department of Defense released its latest roadmap for unmanned systems, the map came in at a punchy 60 pages, far shy of the 160-page tome released in 2013. This is a document less about a military imagining a future of flying robots and more about managing a present that includes them. The normalization of battlefield robots Promised since at least spring 2017, the new roadmap focuses on interoperability, autonomy, network security and human-machine collaboration. The future of drones, and of unpeopled ground vehicles or water vehicles, is as tools that anyone can use, that can do most of what is asked of them on their own, that communicate without giving away the information they are sharing, and that will work to make the humans using the machines function as more-than-human. This is about a normalization of battlefield robots, the same way that mechanized warfare moved from a theoretical approach to the standard style of fighting by nations a few generations ago. Network security isn't as flashy a highlight as “unprecedented battlefield surveillance by flying robot,” but it's part of making sure that those flying cameras don't, say, transmit easily intercepted data over an open channel. “Future warfare will hinge on critical and efficient interactions between war-fighting systems,” states the roadmap. “This interoperable foundation will transmit timely information between information gatherers, decision makers, planners and war fighters.” A network is nothing without its nodes, and the nodes that need to be interoperable here are a vast web of sensors and weapons, distributed among people and machines, that will have to work in concert in order to be worth the networking at all. The very nature of war trends toward pulling apart networks, toward isolation. Those nodes each become a point at which a network can be broken, unless they are redundant or autonomous. Where will the lethal decision lie? Nestled in the section on autonomy, the other signpost feature of the Pentagon's roadmap, is a small chart about the way forward. In that chart is a little box labeled “weaponization,” and in that box it says the near-term goals are DoD strategy assessment and lethal autonomous weapon systems assessment. Lethal autonomous weapon systems are of such international concern that there is a meeting of state dignitaries and humanitarian officials in Geneva happening at the exact moment this roadmap was released. That intergovernmental body is hoping to decide whether or not militaries will develop robots that can kill of their own volition, according to however they've been programmed. The Pentagon, at least in the roadmap, seems content to wait for its own assessment and the verdict of the international community before developing thinking weapons. Hedging on this, the same chart lists “Armed Wingman/Teammate (Human decision to engage)” as the goal for somewhere between 2029 and 2042. “Unmanned systems with integrated AI, acting as a wingman or teammate with lethal armament could perform the vast majority of the actions associated with target identification,tracking, threat prioritization, and post-attack assessment," reads the report. "This level of automation will alleviate the human operator of task-level activities associated with the engagement of a target, allowing the operator to focus on the identified threat and the decision to engage.” The roadmap sketches out a vision of future war that hands off many decisions to autonomous machines, everything from detection to targeting, then loops the lethal decision back to a human responsible for making the call on whether or not the robot should use its weapons on the targets it selected. Humans as battlefield bot-shepards, guiding autonomous machines into combat and signing off on the exact attacks, is a possible future for robots in war, one that likely skirts within the boundaries of still-unsettled international law. Like its predecessor, this drone roadmap is plotting a rough path through newly charted territory. While it leans heavily on the lessons of the present, the roadmap doesn't attempt to answer on its own the biggest questions of what robots will be doing on the battlefields of tomorrow. That is, fundamentally, a political question, and one that much of the American public itself doesn't yet have strong feelings about. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/08/31/new-military-drone-roadmap-ambivalent-on-killer-robots

By Patrick Tucker A look at the Iron Man-like dreams and power-starved realities of dueling technology programs. The Russian suit, Ratnik-3, is an imposing web of hexagonal armor plates, black webbing, and small joint motors called actuators. Oleg Faustov, an engineer working with weapons maker TsNiiTochMash, told Russian media outlet TASS this week that the government had already tested a prototype. “It really enhances a serviceman's physical abilities. For example, the tester was able to shoot from a machine-gun only with one hand and accurately hit targets,” he said at Russia's recent Army-2018 weapons show. As part of the Army-2018 publicity push, the makers of the suit also made vague and unverifiable claims that it had seen actual combat, according to Sam Bendett, an associate research analyst at CNA and a fellow in Russia studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. “It was interesting that the Russian announcement during Army-2018 stated that the exoskeleton was ‘tested in combat,' though without any specific details. It's likely that it was tried in Syria, though the press and media did not cover that development,” he said. While the statement came from the suit's maker, Bendett said he assumes the claim “had to be approved by the state given the combat claims.” The suit is supposed be officially released in 2025. In addition to an almost comically Black Manta-esque helmet, the Ratnik-3 features “40 life-saving elements,” Russian media says. In many ways, it resembles some of the more recent concept images of the TALOS suit that U.S. Special Operations Forces Command, or SOCOM, is attempting to develop. In both, all those bells and whistles seem to be an obstacle to the suit reaching full utility. Both the Ratnik-3 and TALOS efforts seem constrained by available power. “There are issues with the battery and energy sources for this exoskeleton, as Russia—along with other nations working on this—are trying to create a compact energy source that would allow the soldiers to act independent of any stationary or vehicle-borne sources of energy,” Bendett said. Even Russian media have noted the suit's power constraints, noting that a battery life of less than four hours isn't super practical for a day of marching. A forthcoming series of reports from the Center for New American Security, or CNA, takes a deep dive into the issue of soldier augmentation and reaches a similar conclusion. “The current state of technology still does not have sufficient power to manage the intense load-carrying capacity that the SOCOM TALOS suit concept requires...and development is needed before full-body exoskeletons will be feasible for infantry combat away from a reliable power source. Still, these advances represent a major step forward in the necessary technology for dismounted soldier exoskeletons,” notes the report. While size and power constraints are hindering the realization of militaries' most ambitious Iron Man dreams, more modest exoskeleton suits are moving closer to real-world use. The U.S.Army is experimenting with two exoskeleton designs at the Natick Soldier Systems Center in Massachusetts. These won't protect soldiers from enemy fire but they will help soldiers carry more stuff for longer. And they'll likely be on the battlefield far sooner. “Exoskeletons with more modest goals, such as lower-body exoskeletons that are designed simply to increase mobility, reduce energy expenditure, and reduce musculoskeletal injuries, may show more promise in the near-term,” according to the CNAS report. The larger of the two is the ONYX from Lockheed Martin. At a Pentagon event in May, Defense One caught up with Keith Maxwell, a product manager from Lockheed Martin, who described the results of initial tests in November, 2016. “We did an evaluation with some soldiers. They were doing 185-pound squats with the barbell. At the beginning of the day, fresh, Johnny comes in and does 26 reps at 185, puts it down. hat's as many as he can do. We put this on; over the course of the day, he's doing casualty evacuations, carrying people up five flights of stairs and down, going through subterranean tunnels. At the end of the day, we put him back in the gym, ask him, ‘How many squats can you do?' He knocks out 72.” Full article: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/09/russia-us-are-military-exoskeleton-race/150956/

By Joseph Marks The U.S. and four major allies warn new legislation might be necessary to ensure law enforcement can access communications. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen joined leaders of the U.S.'s four major intelligence sharing partners Thursday in a statement urging tech companies to help law enforcement access otherwise-encrypted communications from criminals and terrorists. The joint statement stopped short of urging new laws to mandate that cooperation but warned that “should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions.” The statement from the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, collectively known as the Five Eyes, describes law enforcement's inability to access encrypted communications as “a pressing international concern that requires urgent, sustained attention.” While “governments should recognize that the nature of encryption is such that there will be situations where access to information is not possible,” the statement notes, “such situations should be rare.” Obama and Trump administration officials have warned since 2014 that end-to-end encryption systems, which shield the content of communications even from the communications provider, are allowing criminals and terrorists to plan operations outside law enforcement's reach. Legislative proposals that would make it easier for police to access those communications have failed to gain traction, however, even after a 2015 showdown between the FBI and Apple over an encrypted iPhone used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook. An inspector general's investigation in March found the FBI rushed to court in that case, seeking to compel Apple's assistance without exploring other options for cracking into the phone. Thursday's statement notes that: “Providers of information and communications technology and services ... are subject to the law, which can include requirements to assist authorities to lawfully access data, including the content of communications.” The statement does not go into detail, however, about what laws would justify those requirements and how they should be interpreted. The San Bernardino case was never decided in court because an unknown third party sold the FBI a method for breaking through the phone's passcode and accessing its encrypted contents. U.S. tech companies, for the most part, have resisted calls to cooperate with law enforcement. They argue that any effort to weaken encryption would be found and exploited by criminal hackers or foreign spies. Technologists, civil libertarians and many members of Congress have urged police to use other methods to break through encrypted communications without forcing companies to help or installing government backdoors into encryption systems. Those methods include obtaining a warrant to hack into the communications and building a case using unencrypted metadata. During the summit, Nielsen and other Five Eyes officials also agreed to strengthen cooperation between their nations' cyber centers and to cooperate on improving the cybersecurity of supply chains for critical infrastructure such as energy plants and airports. https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2018/08/five-eyes-intel-alliance-urges-big-tech-help-break-encrypted-messages/150961/

BY FRANK KONKEL MilCloud 2.0 is about to host a lot more data, and the Defense Department wants ideas for how to get it there faster. The Defense Department's technical arm wants to see what capabilities exist in the marketplace to improve the migration of data and applications to milCloud 2.0, the Pentagon's on-premise cloud. On Wednesday, the Defense Information Systems Agency issued a request for informationto industry seeking input on “rapid cloud migration” as it aims to understand capabilities relevant to “automated cloud migration techniques.” The RFI, which does not constitute a solicitation but could lead to one-on-one discussions with vendors, comes three months after Pentagon memo directed all “fourth-estate” defense agencies to migrate all data and applications to milCloud 2.0 by 2020. In the interim, the Office of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer had planned to coordinate with affected agencies, including DISA, to plan their cloud migrations. MilCloud 2.0 went live earlier this year as part of a three-year, $500 million contract won by CSRA, which has since been purchased by defense contractor General Dynamics. The RFI makes clear the Pentagon's current migration strategy, which includes “manual cloning and conversion of server images, which are then provisioned, into the new cloud environment, or provisioning, building and configuring applications on virtual servers from scratch,” is not sufficient. “This RFI seeks migration solutions that can accurately duplicate the suite of servers used with an application from their current environment into a cloud environment built on Apache CloudStack technology and KVM hypervisor,” the RFI states. “The scope of duplication includes all applications used with the system, configuration of network and network security controls when proper APIs are exposed, and identification of interactions within the application system and to external systems when needed network traffic is made available for analysis.” Options, the RFI says, could include the “use of vendor-provided tools or analytic capabilities if packet captures, or other network monitoring information.” Industry responses must be received by Sept. 10. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/08/defense-department-seeks-rapid-cloud-migration-ideas-milcloud/150934/

By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany – Germany is one step closer to getting its own version of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as officials here seek to bolster the country's cybersecurity posture. The Cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel this week approved the new organization, to be headed jointly by the Defense and Interior ministries. The outfit is slated to get a budget of €200 million ($230 million) between 2019 and 2022. The new “Agency for Innovation in Cybersecurity” will eventually have 100 employees. The German parliament, the Bundestag, will debate the proposal in the upcoming months. Once the funding is cleared, analysts will begin their work in earnest next year. While the Pentagon's DARPA served as a model in creating the new organization, the American agency's funding and personnel commitment dwarfs that of new German effort. But the move is still a major step forward here because it shows a political commitment to cyberspace in the context of defense and security that officials said was previously lacking. Notably, one of the explicit goals is to speed up the acquisition cycle for cybersecurity technology. That puts Germany in the same boat as many governments around the world, where officials have found themselves perennially lagging behind sophisticated attack schemes employed by hackers. Full article: https://www.fifthdomain.com/global/europe/2018/08/31/german-cabinet-approves-new-cybersecurity-agency

Kathleen Harris · CBC News Canada and security allies say illicit material is flourishing and easily accessible on the web Canada and its "Five Eyes" intelligence allies are calling on the digital online industry to take urgent action to stop child pornographers, terrorists and violent extremists from finding a platform on the internet. After meetings in Australia, ministers from that country, Canada, New Zealand, the U.S. and U.K., issued a statement claiming the group is as determined to counter the "grave threats" online as they are to dealing with them in the physical world. "Our citizens expect online spaces to be safe, and are gravely concerned about illegal and illicit online content, particularly the online sexual exploitation of children. We stand united in affirming that the rule of law can and must prevail online," reads the joint communique issued Wednesday. Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould attended the meetings. 'New vectors for harm' The joint statement says the anonymous, instantaneous and networked nature of the web has magnified threats and "opened up new vectors for harm." It also notes that the evolution of digital technology has created new opportunities for transmitting child exploitation material and perpetrating the most abhorrent acts, such as live streaming abuse. The statement says illicit material is not relegated to the recesses of the dark web, but is accessible through most common top‑level domains. Mobile technology has enabled offenders to target children using apps to recruit and coerce children. "The low financial cost, and the anonymized nature of this criminal enterprise, is contributing to a growth in the sexual exploitation of children. We must escalate government and industry efforts to stop this," it reads. Lianna McDonald, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection welcomed the joint statement. "Our organization has been engaging directly with survivors of child sexual abuse who endure lifelong impacts from the recording and sharing of their abuse on the internet," she said in an emailed statement "Collaboration across borders and with all sectors, including industry, is essential if we are to make meaningful progress in this space and address this heinous crime." Tackling terrorist fundraising The communique also pledges to do more to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from spreading materials designed to radicalize, recruit, fundraise and mobilize. Actions urged by the Five Eyes group include: Developing and implementing capabilities to prevent illegal and illicit content from being uploaded, and to execute urgent and immediate takedown measures when there is an upload. Deploying human and automated capabilities to find and remove legacy content. Investing more on automated capabilities and techniques, including photo DNA tools, to detect, remove and prevent reupload of illegal and illicit content. Building user safety into the design of all online platforms and services. Allen Mendelsohn, an internet law specialist and lecturer at McGill's law faculty, said because child porn is universally deemed reprehensible, he expects mounting governmental and public pressure could prompt tech companies to act. But, he said in past, they have resisted any steps to remove content, citing the "slippery slope" argument. "They are loathe to take any sort of action that would be seen as removing or not displaying any particular content that has been uploaded by users," he said. "They have taken the longstanding position that user content is the user's responsibility, not the platform's responsibility." Mendelsohn said the issue is complicated because there are differing laws and views internationally on what constitutes crossing the line for the internet. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/SOMNIA-1.4803122

David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen Officials admit they have never tested the latest search and rescue gear to be used by the military and coast guard Canada is under no obligation to ensure the military equipment it purchases can actually do the job, federal officials are arguing, as they admit they have never tested the latest search and rescue gear to be used by the military and coast guard. The admission by staff of Public Services and Procurement Canada is among the evidence in a complaint by two defence firms that argue the government's decision to award a contract to a rival company was unfair. The complaint was filed on July 27 with the Canadian International Trade Tribunal by Kongsberg Geospatial of Ottawa on behalf of Critical Software, a Portuguese firm. The complaint centres on the government decision to name MDA Systems the winner of a $5.6 million contract to provide software to help in search and rescue missions. Critical Software, which teamed with Kongsberg to bid on the project, had originally raised concerns with the government about why the two companies' proposal was thrown out on a technicality. The Critical Software system is used by more than 1,000 organizations, such as coast guards, police and military in more than 30 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. But because Critical Software and Kongsberg didn't provide a percentage figure of how many systems were in use in each region, their bid was disqualified by the government. The two companies questioned that decision and were stunned when federal officials admitted they have never tested the winning system and didn't actually know whether it meets the requirements of the Canadian Forces or the Canadian Coast Guard. Public Service and Procurement Canada officials stated “Canada may, but will have no obligation, to require that the top-ranked Bidder demonstrate any features, functionality and capabilities described in this bid solicitation or in its bid,” according to the federal response provided to Kongsberg/Critical Software and included in its complaint to the trade tribunal. The government noted in its response that such an evaluation would be conducted after the contract was awarded and insisted the acquisition process was fair and open. Full article: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/no-need-to-ensure-military-equipment-purchased-actually-works-government-officials-argue-in-procurement-dispute