Ottawa has started to make payments for key components for 14 additional U.S.-built F-35s, even as the Carney government has been reviewing future fighter-jet purchases in the context of trade tensions with Washington, sources have told CBC News.
The money for these 14 aircraft is in addition to the contract for a first order of 16 F-35s, which will start being delivered to the Canadian Armed Forces at the end of the year.
According to sources, the new expenses are related to the purchase of so-called “long-lead items,” which are parts that must be ordered well in advance of the delivery of a fully assembled aircraft.
Canada had to make these expenditures to maintain its place in the long-term delivery schedule and avoid being replaced by other buyers in the queue, sources said.
So there could be a line of code already in the firmware which, upon receiving a certain signal, kills all of the F-35’s computer systems, essentially making it useless.
Seems easy enough to me
Like VW firmware that knew when emissions were being tested. You can hide it in there for sure
It wouldn’t even have to be that. There’s enough specialized US data communication and GPS microchips in there that any one of them could be compromised. There’s more than enough history of this, people not willing to consider it are part of a bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_backdoor#History
I’ll take the word of the head of communication at a German defense company that has actually vetted the systems over armchair commenters any day.
Then there’s the possibility of backdoors to access mission critical data by deliberately compromising their encryption: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-the-nsa-attempting-to-insert-backdoors-into-encrypted-data
Then there’s the chasm between “complete technical schematics” being available and actually being able to produce said equipment without resorting to a US controlled supply line. It’s not just firmware, if they cut off access to maintenance supplies, you aren’t going to have it easier than Russia is having it with their sanctions, it’s still going to take its toll on your supply line.
Here’s the source that previous poster failed to include for this part: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/german-policymakers-concerned-american-kill-switch-disable-f35
That article is largely a pile of meaningless sensationalism with very little in the way of meaningful claims. All of it more or less boils down to this;
This is a claim that’s been repeated a bunch in the armchair general circuit, but without any of the actual context, and mangled beyond recognition from what the original sources say. ALIS cannot “ground” a plane in the sense of “Prevent it from taking off at the press of a button.” It’s a logistics management system. All it does is track parts orders. The US could shut people out of it, which would be a massive pain in the ass, but it wouldn’t actually prevent planes from flying.
Here’s a source that actually digs into a little better: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2016/04/27/could-connectivity-failure-ground-f-35-it-s-complicated/
First, some context (from the article) on what ALIS actually is:
When the previous poster’s quote source talks about the mission planning system, this is what they’re referring to (I’m going to skip right past their assertion that the kill switch “is more than just a rumour” because the article presents this claim with absolutely zero evidence, context, or expansion; it’s just thrown out there and treated as gospel truth. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence).
Anyway, from the article I cited;
Emphasis mine. ALIS cannot “ground” planes, it can only make it harder to maintain them. And only to the extent that it’s already hard to maintain existing planes like our CF-18s. This is a solved problem. We know how to do this. It’s not a magic kill switch, it can’t shut anything off. It’s just an inventory management system.
You claim this is a “ground-based system”, but that is not true according to this description:
“the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) … is a router designed to fit inside of an F-35’s travel pod that has the capability to connect to a hardline network or satellite internet, which allows them to transmit the F-35’s data simultaneously to many remote bands and regions”
https://www.dvidshub.net/image/7342014/autonomic-logistics-information-system
So while the analysis of the data happens on the ground, ALIS is also very much inside the plane and monitors its systems in real-time:
“ALIS receives Health Reporting Codes while the F-35 is still in flight”
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/rms/documents/alis/CS00086-55 (ALIS Product Card).pdf
Yet you claim “all it does is track parts orders.”
Care to explain why you have omitted these basic facts while defending Canada’s purchase of the F-35s?
Ground based. This doesn’t exclude it having components onboard the aircraft.
And yes, fundamentally, tracking inventory and maintenance requirements is all it does. I apologize if I oversimplified the details a little too much, but I’m trying to keep things readable and not get bogged down in details, and it wasn’t relevant to my point. And if you’d thought about it a little longer you’d quickly realise that it’s not relevant to whatever point you seem to be trying to make either.
ALIS includes a component that is carried aboard the plane and provides telemetry. Fact freely granted.
And entirely irrelevant to the notion I was addressing. The fact that ALIS transmits information from the craft is not germane to the point that it cannot be used to affect the operability of the craft - and that’s according to the people who actually use and maintain these systems. I’m not making these claims; the experts are.
But none of that occurred to you because you are so desperate to try to find some kind of conspiracy theory here. To the point where even bothering to write this reply is pointless, because I can only assume that you’ve decided that I’m some kind of deep cover CIA agent here on direct orders from Steven Miller.
It is fucking exhausting talking to you people. I genuinely cannot comprehend the insane degree to which any tangential detail gets fantasized and catastrophized into an elaborate work of Tom Clancy fan fiction.
“You people”
Hey look, I never made any claims other than pointing out that you were clearly intentionally being misleading.
Anyway: would you fly a plane if you could not verify that it was in working order?
You know, I did actually try to head off this line of reasoning by pointing out that a) we have the entire technical package, and b) there are no extraneous communications going into or out of a stealth fighter, of any kind.
Like, buddy, I really did try to give you all the pieces. I was like “Do I need to spoon feed ALL the conclusions? No, they’re a smart enough person, they’ll figure it out.”
No, that is not a remotely practical idea. First, no one is just accepting whatever random signals they get sent while flying a stealth fighter, or indeed any kind of fighter. Electronic warfare has been a thing for as long as integrated circuits have, we’re not idiots.
But more importantly, any capability you put in firmware has to ultimately talk to the hardware. There has to be an actual lever to pull, somewhere. It’s not magic. And firmware isn’t like the software on your phone; it’s not a general purpose computer. You can’t just run an app. There’s no kernel to allocate resources. Every single component on the F-35 has its own firmware, that runs that component, and the ability for those components to communicate with each other is strictly limited to what can actually be communicated at a hardware level. At some point any kind of “killswitch” would ultimately require hardware capabilities that would be obvious to anyone with the technical package, because those are exactly the kind of cascade failures that you would want to make impossible in the event that there was, say, an entirely normal, non-malicious bug in the firmware. You build these things to be failure proof, which makes it very hard to then sneak in ways to deliberately make them fail.
And I think the part that, above all else, you really, really need to wrap your head around is that we’re not idiots. Canada is an extremely technically capable nation. We didn’t buy this thing without experts reading the specs. And those same specs were read by experts from every other country in NATO, and none of them believe this kill switch myth is real.
So basically your theory stands on the assertion that you - John or Jane Internet User from Fucking Wherever - have, with zero access to any of the technical data, spotted a danger that all of the experts from every country in NATO missed, throughout the entire thirty plus years of the F-35 program, through around five different US administrations, all of them working in concert to conceal these capabilities, with zero complaint from Lockheed Martin, one of their biggest defence contractors, who don’t even mind that discovery of this capability would destroy their international sales forever.
That’s flat earth levels of self-delusion.
Anything can be in the firmware, there’s no reason the payload signal has to be processed at the same point in the signal chain as everything else. And I’m not saying that it needs to be a complete fly-by-wire system, just sufficient to be able to ground the craft, which seems trivial to me - all you’d need to do is to just stop processing all signals on the bus.
I can 100% believe that the consortium of corrupt liars and incompetents that make purchasing decisions could absolutely miss this - either on accident or on purpose. Where do you derive your unshakable faith in leaders?
Again, you’re claiming that every single country in NATO missed this. All of them.
That’s insane. If you’re still pushing this line of reasoning I have nothing else to say to you. I can only assume you also believe that COVID 19 was a Canadian Military psy-op, the moon landings were faked, and that lizardmen from the hollow earth secretly control all the world governments.
An even more absurd argument would be to think that every state in NATO, when combined, was incapable of missing backdoors. As if when you get enough imperial forces together, suddenly they become omniscient. Perfectly infallible. Give me a break.
Intel Management Engine is a well known backdoor that is present in every single Intel CPU/motherboard and it is literally all over all of NATO. People said that didn’t exist until exploits started popping up, years later, in devices every single consumer has easy, convenient, 24 hour access to.
NATO was built on the understanding that the US could be relied upon to act in the interests of NATO as a whole. I do not think that the threat from US has been adequately considered by other NATO countries until now.
If you don’t see how opaque firmware blobs which could potentially contain literally anything could have been an underestimated threat by NATO countries (all of which, by the way, are basically just US client states), then I suspect you’re rather closer to delusional thinking than I am.
Lemmy military experts watch a lot of TV.
They aren’t idiots. You don’t set up your entire military to be bricked by a hack.
Maybe they’re idiots, maybe they believe the US/Lockheed’s insistence that there isn’t any way to do it, maybe they’re traitors. Either way, yes, they are setting up their entire military to be bricked by a hack.
Sure buddy, everyone is stupid except you.
Thankfully, I am not the only person with a functioning model of reality. I don’t think everyone is stupid, I just think most people are brainwashed.