Germany May Refuse F-35 Purchase over ‘Emergency Switch;’ Consider Eurofighter Instead
www.defensemirror.com
According to reports, a software back-door switch will turn the aircraft off if the client state does not follow Washington’s diktat in the use of the F-35.

I haven’t done adequate due diligence yet - could be inaccurate

I came across this article alleging that Germany is considering bailing on the F-35 aircraft because the US can remotely disable them.

If the US could do this to German F-35s, presumably they can do it to ours…

Additional reporting alleging concern in Canadian defence circles

  • uuldika@lemmy.ml
    11·
    20 hours ago

    Every serious defence analyst has laughed at the idea that the F-35 has a secret killswitch. This would be the dumbest thing ever to include in an aircraft, because there is always the possibility that your enemies could find out about it.

    just cryptographically sign the kill switch transmission. the fighter would contain the public key to verify, but enemies would need the private key to trigger it, which the NSA would keep buried in cold storage like the DUAL-EC-DRBG trapdoor key.

    you’d probably also want to include the fighter’s serial number or IFF transponder code, so the enemy couldn’t capture or replay.

    Consider; if an F-35 kill switch did exist, any buyer of the craft could invest the resources required to go over every inch of circuit and line of code and find it, and then deactivate every US F-35.

    there’s something like 100M LoC of C++ (not Ada 😥) in an F-35. and Canada doesn’t have the sources, so they’d have to decompile that. maybe they could focus on the radios, radar and other devices direct connection to receivers, but the implant might be downstream, and there’s a lot of ways to hide an antenna.

    even dumping the chips isn’t easy. many of them likely have security features, since they contain classified algorithms which the DoD would rather enemies not be able to extract from the downed wreckage of a fighter. certainly the JTAG pins are not going to be enabled. even die shots could be frustrated by metal meshes over the wafer or possibly even microscopic amounts of explosives triggered by de-lidding.

    But this “killswitch” nonsense just derails that important discussion into paranoid conspiracy theorist nonsense rooted in the deranged ramblings of a self-aggrandizing madman.

    there’s secure ways to build a kill switch, there’s an abundance of places to hide it in a highly complex fighter, and this kind of spooky stuff is well within the NSA’s wheelhouse. it’s the kind of thing NSA is known for, even - the Crypto AG CIA front, the DUAL-EC-DRBG backdoor, TAO’s clandestine program to intercept and backdoor mailed routers and servers. they clearly can do this kind of thing, since they clearly have before.

    did they backdoor the F-35? I don’t know, but it’s plausible, and CSIS/CSE should investigate.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      19 hours ago

      There has to be some kind of direct connection between the communications systems and the flight critical systems for any of that to even be remotely plausible. That kind of connection is basically impossible to hide, and simply would not exist in a well designed piece of military hardware. It’s existence would be immediately obvious to the people buying the plane, and the people tasked with maintaining it.

      Show me one single military analyst with worthwhile credentials who believes this is a serious concern. Not articles like this one where they take a quote wildly out of context and use it to backup an entirely fabricated claim. I mean an actual certifiable expert stating clearly and unambiguously that the possible existence of this killswitch is something we have to be worried about.