14 ms·
> The 13 deficiencies include: The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the Unit
by cantrevealname 7y ago
> The 13 deficiencies include: The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.
I marvel at how foreign buyers of something as complex as stealth aircraft can have any confidence that the system is not riddled with back doors, remote control capability, "phoning home", surveillance, and kill switches. How would you prove to a foreign buyer that your F-35 would not:
- upload all your secret flight data to a tire pressure monitor every time a maintenance worker checks the tires with the special gauge he has to use, which then retransmits the data when the gauge is put back in the hanger, without needing any cooperation from the maintenance worker
- cause all your F-35s to fall out of sky everywhere in the world when the GPS satellites transmit an extra 64-bit coded message that cause fuel actuators to shut off
- put your F-35 under remote control when a coded microwave message is transmitted directly to the plane during combat or a close encounter
Even children's toys and home appliances are routinely discovered to be phoning home and doing sneaky unexpected things. I'm going to hazard a guess that all large weapons systems are compromised —— perhaps by more than one nation simultaneously since parts and expertise come from hundreds of contractors and many different countries. I'm not aware of any revelations of weapon-system backdoors yet, but we might hear about some of them in the aftermath of the next major war.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoBack in 1982's Falklands war, the Argentines sunk two British destroyers with French-made Exocet surface missiles, towards the beginning, and then stopped scoring any hits. I once heard unsourced speculation that the French might have given the British the scoop on how to sabotage incoming missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War
- tyingq 7y agoIt seems they only had 5 total of the Exocets to fire. One hit the HMS Sheffield, two hit the merchant ship Atlantic Conveyor, and one hit the destroyer HMS Glamorgan. So that's 4 of the 5. I think they just ran out of missiles. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17256975 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17256975 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocet#The_Falklands_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exocet#The_Falklands_War
- nextos 7y agoIt's also worth to note the hit to HMS Glamorgan required Argentina to hack a pair of Exocets to fire them from land without any cooperation from France, which was quite impressive.
- baud147258 7y agoI thought that some French tech support/engineers from the company building the missiles stayed in Argentina to continue their job. Same with the French people supporting the French-made airplanes. Edit: even if France supported the UK during the war, preventing the delivery of more exocet missiles and providing information on the missiles and airplanes to the UK. Edit 2: Apparently it was an oversight, the French team in Argentina was never told to stop working. Also I guess the missile builder might have been happy to have a live fire demonstration of his products
- nextos 7y agoYes, I think it was a great ad campaign. A much inferior airforce posed serious trouble to a big power thanks to their great product. To be fair, Israel also advised Argentina on air-to-sea surface attack tactics that proved to be seriously good.
- growlist 7y ago> A much inferior airforce posed serious trouble to a big power thanks to their great product. There's no denying their effectiveness in this example, but then the context was the UK was fighting a conflict halfway across the world and without air superiority. Take away either of those elements and the Super Etendards were likely to have been obliterated long before their Exocets were within range.
- nextos 7y agoNobody said it was an easy conflict to fight for the UK. But Argentina was also ill prepared. They should have waited a few months till they received a whole batch of Exocets, which was already bought and in production. With many Exocets, they could have launched a saturation attack which would have caused serious damage to the British fleet. Furthermore, waiting would have meant the islands would have entered Antartic winter shortly after invasion, giving them many months to dig in and prepare for UK Task Force landings.
- smackay 7y agoI have a vague memory that there were also problems with the Sea Wolf based defence system on the ships. The controlling software apparently recognised the incoming Exocets as friendly. I don't know if there is any credibility to this but I am sure it would have been fixed pretty rapidly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Wolf_(missile) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Wolf_(missile)
- jt2190 7y agoI heard something similar, I believe reported by the television news program “60 Minutes”, but the report I remember was about the Phalanx missile defense system not recognizing the Exocet as an “enemy” missile since it was a NATO weapon. Edit: Note that I’m working off of very old memories, and the 60 minutes reports may not have been accurate.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y agoFWIW, I was in high school at the time and I remember something similar.
- NikkiA 7y agoNone of the UK ships had Phalanx at that point in time, so it can't have been that.
- lb1lf 7y agoAccording to an army grunt friend of mine, there's a truism in his profession which goes "Friendly fire... ISN'T!" Joking aside, I would assume current IFF systems let you define anything not explicitly friendly as hostile - what with shifting alliances, armament development consolidation &c - the issue being how many backdoors there are. I take it as a given no US-made missile can kill a US-operated aircraft, regardless of what the operator of the missile desires. (Same goes for French, British, Russian &c)
- SEJeff 7y ago"There are no missed shots, just some bullets containing 'To whom it may concern'".
- trhway 7y ago>I once heard unsourced speculation that the French might have given the British the scoop on how to sabotage incoming missiles. reminded by association - in the new Russian&Serbian movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Balkan_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Balkan_Line released for the 20th anniversary of the war there is a scene with the French bomb dropped on a house in Serbia and which didn't explode because it was intentionally sabotaged. Doesn’t seem to have propaganda value, and I’m wondering whether it is a play on real facts or just an artistic reference to the French resistance to the NATO bombing of civilian targets.
- EliRivers 7y agoFrom another perspective, creating yourself a brand new weapon system that is designed to be vulnerable to remote attacks, data theft, falling out of the sky on demand, and so on, seems like making yourself really, really vulnerable.
- manfredo 7y agoAnd not to mention, likely unnecessary. Even just cutting a foreign nation off from spare parts and maintenance crews is enough to ground planes, as Iran discovered in the Iran-Iraq war.
- xysg 7y agothe F-35 is only supposed to be sold to close allies anyway so I doubt secrecy from the US is on the top of buyers' minds? conversely, they'd likely engage in joint exercises with the US.
- xiphias2 7y agoWhat does close ally mean? Germany was supposed to be a closed ally, but Merkel wasn't that happy when she realized that the USA is spying on her. It looks like the governments are starting to be less friendly towards eachother as the currencies in the world are collapsing.
- smcl 7y agoWait, it sounds like you're saying some worldwide currency collapse is in motion. What's that in reference to?
- jpambrun 7y agoThe US already in an economic dispute with many allies (including Canada) citing national security threats. At this rate, the US might have no close allies left by the end of life of the F35s.
- onepointsixC 7y agoPOTUS needs to cite national security as is how he is able to unilaterally place those tariffs without congress. Furthermore natsec threats doesn't mean that a partner is not trustworthy. Australia is one of America's longest standing and most dependable ally. If the US were to use Australia as it's primary rare earth mineral supplier a perfectly valid argument could be made that in the event of a global war an adversary could disrupt trade between the US and Australia. Thus there would be a national security threat.
- Josh379 7y agoOf course the US has backdoors. What they are buying is the power to fight US enemies. Not US friends or the US itself.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoThis is a result of complexity, not the systems themselves. Anything that is complex has vulnerabilities. It might as well be a law of computing.
- bdamm 7y agoIt is worth noting that the dominant systems architectures of today help ensure vulnerabilities remain. Doing something about this could become a defining factor of computing in the 21st century.
- smacktoward 7y agoThe thing is that nobody just buys a weapon in isolation. You buy into a weapons system, which includes not just the weapon itself but a whole universe of concerns that surround it: logistical concerns like spare parts, fuel and ammunition, operational concerns like tactical doctrines that work well with the weapon, and so forth. Without that stuff, the weapon by itself is pretty close to useless. All of which means that it's more or less impossible to buy a weapon from a foreign power without opening yourself up wide to that power. You have to let their military advisors onto your bases, to train your troops on the doctrines that go with the weapon. You have to let their logistical specialists into your inventory systems, so they can hook you into the pipelines through which the spare parts and ammo flow. Any of these people could be using their access to snoop on you or worse, but there's not much you can do about that because without them all you've bought is a $100 million paperweight. If you're the buyer, yes, that absolutely sucks. But, unless you're willing to spend vast amounts of money you don't have to build up your own domestic military-industrial complex, you don't have a lot of alternatives. You either buy into one of the existing ecosystems (American, Russian, European or Chinese), or get curb-stomped by a neighbor who did. Once you're bought into one of those ecosystems you're effectively at the mercy of the state that operates it, of course, but hey, you do what you've gotta do. As the saying goes, the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.
- luch 7y agoYep, nobody buy F-35 planes because it's a superior airplane (it's not) countries buy it in order to have better diplomatic relationships with the USA. It's pretty telling to see Germany refusing to buy F-35 or Hungary buying ones in order to piss off Sweden.
- martin_bech 7y agoThats also the situation here in Denmark.. everyone knows its the most expensive, and not the best.. yet we bought it. We havent even gotten the planes yet, but we have also been asked to buy spare parts in advance, as they might not be able to provide them later.. wtf?. Also we have been asked to let a number of the planes remain in the US, for “training”.. this is the shittiest of shitty deals..
- nexuist 7y agoI find it odd that this is a realistic concern on HN of all places. It's a physical object - and we all know that physical presence means instant own. How would you prove to a foreign buyer that your F-35 is not backdoored? You wouldn't. You sell them the plane and then they have the best cybersecurity experts the market can provide go into the hangar and completely tear the whole thing apart, inspecting every on board computer, dumping assembly code, inspecting circuit boards, etc. These are being bought by nation states, not Grandma who doesn't know her router has an admin interface with a default password. Any attempt to backdoor that gets discovered would be an international incident and severely strain diplomatic relations between the U.S. and all of its allies. At the very least, anyone looking for nextgen fighters now would look somewhere else now knowing that we have no qualms with screwing with their defenses.
- stcredzero 7y agoIt's a physical object - and we all know that physical presence means instant own. It's more like eventual own, depending on your time frame. If someone wants to to to lengths to physically secure something, it can probably withstand 1 seconds of intrusion time. It has closer to zero chance of withstanding 36000 seconds, and very close to zero chance of withstanding 360000 seconds.
- stcredzero 7y ago- cause all your F-35s to fall out of sky everywhere in the world when the GPS satellites transmit an extra 64-bit coded message that cause fuel actuators to shut off This is very close to a plot point from Battlestar galactica (2004). I don't know of a way off the top of my head to detect back doors other than manually reviewing code. A large company which has a database of many back doors might be able to train an AI to find them. I'm going to guess that someone, somewhere is trying to do this, somehow.