US Stealth Jet Has To Talk To Allied Planes Over Unsecured Radio 270
Lasrick writes "David Axe at Wired's Danger Room explains: 'For the first time, America's top-of-the-line F-22 fighters and Britain's own cutting-edge Typhoon jets have come together for intensive, long-term training in high-tech warfare. If only the planes could talk to each other on equal terms. The F-22 and the twin-engine, delta-wing Typhoon — Europe’s latest warplane — are stuck with partially incompatible secure communications systems. For all their sophisticated engines, radars and weapons, the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks. That is, unless they want to talk via old-fashioned radio, which can be intercepted and triangulated and could betray the planes’ locations. That would undermine the whole purpose of the F-22s radar-evading stealth design, and could pose a major problem if the Raptor and the Typhoon ever have to go to war together.'"
Re:Ironic (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget French and Poles. Credit where is due.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma
Re:Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't think the cypher is the problem. (Score:5, Informative)
F22s can talk to each other, but it requires a special data link that is apparently top secret and cannot be given out to allied aircraft.
Re:I don't think the cypher is the problem. (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect. The F-22 and F-35 have both active and passive seekers, and they're able to determine range, altitude, and bearing with just their passive seeker.
Re:I don't think the cypher is the problem. (Score:5, Informative)
precisely. its a non-story written by the same idiot at wired who constantly uses every opportunity he can to bash on the F22 and F35, while glossing over or ignoring inconvenient facts.
I'm not saying they arent without their problems...i'm saying the writer has proven in the past he has an axe to grind, much like the that Broder guy at NYT writing about the Tesla last week.
another thing he misses, is that most aircraft are not locked into a single design. it's entirely possible to replace the radios with other radios. you'd have to redraw some tech manuals, and maybe run some more wires. but its not unheard of and actually quite common for hardware to be updated.
Re:I don't think the cypher is the problem. (Score:5, Informative)
Partly true.
In order to passively seek, there has to be something to be sought.
in other words, it only works if the other guy is actively emitting in some way.
if the other guy is also only passively seeking, neither one can see the other.
basic physics, engineering, logic, or whatever you want to call it.
the only passive seeker that will always remain effective is IR band, because they kinda need the engines to fly. but its also rather short range, wont give real accurate RAB (RAB being only really relevent for BVR) and if you're that close and can pickup his tailpipes, you already know where he's at, and which way hes going.
Re:I don't think the cypher is the problem. (Score:4, Informative)
That sure sounds Really Scary... but technical jargon and buzzwords always do when thrown about by people who don't really know what they're talking about. (Note that the bit about triangulation was added by the submitter - it does not appear in the original article.)
Triangulation against a jet is just barely this side of useless - the damm thing is flying at several hundred miles an hour. A second or two after he stops transmitting, your triangulation solution has lost significant value because he's miles away from the datum point. Your solution just degrades from there and by ten seconds or so you might as well have been using a Ouija board.* Has anyone actually deployed the RDF gear that would be required for high speed tactical 3D triangulation? It's not particularly high tech, but it's also something that can't be cobbled together on short notice out of 'stone knives and bearskins'. To be any kind of useful, you need high accuracy (within +/- a degree or so), which means sophisticated antenna designs and significant signal processing. (Real life RDF isn't a simple as it is in the movies.)
Another problem you face is that you can't use triangulation to fire weapons... you need some way of handing the track off to the radar needed for SAM's or AA guns, or off to the fighter which will then need to obtain radar or IR lock to fire a missile or to obtain visual contact.
So, the real problem isn't triangulation... it's breaking stealth. An unsecured transmission can provide a raid warning. It can warn radar operators to pay really close attention to the 'fluff' on their screens. Etc... etc...
* Yes, I have experience with using triangulation tactically... it was sonar and ASW, so the timescale was longer but the general principles remain the same.
Re:Ironic (Score:2, Informative)
The technique used is almost certainly a form of spread-spectrum transmission, making its interception by an ordinary receiver unable to listen in or conventional triangulation useless.
Um, spread spectrum can still be detected and the location of its source triangulated. It does complicate things somewhat when it's hopping from frequency to frequency, but it hardly makes it impossible.
Ultimately, if a stealth plane wants to remain truly stealthy, it also needs to observe radio silence [wired.com]. There are things they can do to make their transmissions less obvious (including using spread spectrum), but ultimately none of these technique are completely effective.
Re:Ironic (Score:4, Informative)
Spread spectrum and frequency hopping are two different things. You seem to be mixing them up or considering them the same thing.
Re:Ironic (Score:4, Informative)
public key cryptography (invented in the 1970s, mostly down to the RSA authors) was not among this work.
--Freddie Widgeon
It was actually invented over a hundred years earlier than that, and GCHQ developed an RSA equivalent with Diffie-Hellman key exchange several years before RSA was created or before Diffie and Hellman published their work. Occasionally the UK does manage to keep something secret :)