Tag Archives: military

Encryption Backdoor in Military/Police Radios

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/encryption-backdoor-in-military-police-radios.html

I wrote about this in 2023. Here’s the story:

Three Dutch security analysts discovered the vulnerabilities­—five in total—­in a European radio standard called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and others. The standard has been used in radios since the ’90s, but the flaws remained unknown because encryption algorithms used in TETRA were kept secret until now.

There’s new news:

In 2023, Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of security firm Midnight Blue, based in the Netherlands, discovered vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms that are part of a European radio standard created by ETSI called TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which has been baked into radio systems made by Motorola, Damm, Sepura, and others since the ’90s. The flaws remained unknown publicly until their disclosure, because ETSI refused for decades to let anyone examine the proprietary algorithms.

[…]

But now the same researchers have found that at least one implementation of the end-to-end encryption solution endorsed by ETSI has a similar issue that makes it equally vulnerable to eavesdropping. The encryption algorithm used for the device they examined starts with a 128-bit key, but this gets compressed to 56 bits before it encrypts traffic, making it easier to crack. It’s not clear who is using this implementation of the end-to-end encryption algorithm, nor if anyone using devices with the end-to-end encryption is aware of the security vulnerability in them.

[…]

The end-to-end encryption the researchers examined recently is designed to run on top of TETRA encryption algorithms.

The researchers found the issue with the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) only after extracting and reverse-engineering the E2EE algorithm used in a radio made by Sepura.

These seem to be deliberately implemented backdoors.

The Ramifications of Ukraine’s Drone Attack

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/the-ramifications-of-ukraines-drone-attack.html

You can read the details of Operation Spiderweb elsewhere. What interests me are the implications for future warfare:

If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases? Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.

The Atlantic makes similar points.

There’s a balance between the cost of the thing, and the cost to destroy the thing, and that balance is changing dramatically. This isn’t new, of course. Here’s an article from last year about the cost of drones versus the cost of top-of-the-line fighter jets. If $35K in drones (117 drones times an estimated $300 per drone) can destroy $7B in Russian bombers and other long-range aircraft, why would anyone build more of those planes? And we can have this discussion about ships, or tanks, or pretty much every other military vehicle. And then we can add in drone-coordinating technologies like swarming.

Clearly we need more research on remotely and automatically disabling drones.

Friday Squid Blogging: US Naval Ship Attacked by Squid in 1978

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/05/friday-squid-blogging-us-naval-ship-attacked-by-squid-in-1978.html

Interesting story:

USS Stein was underway when her anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly stopped working. On returning to port and putting the ship in a drydock, engineers observed many deep scratches in the sonar dome’s rubber “NOFOUL” coating. In some areas, the coating was described as being shredded, with rips up to four feet long. Large claws were left embedded at the bottom of most of the scratches.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Whale Song Code

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/whale-song-code.html

During the Cold War, the US Navy tried to make a secret code out of whale song.

The basic plan was to develop coded messages from recordings of whales, dolphins, sea lions, and seals. The submarine would broadcast the noises and a computer—the Combo Signal Recognizer (CSR)—would detect the specific patterns and decode them on the other end. In theory, this idea was relatively simple. As work progressed, the Navy found a number of complicated problems to overcome, the bulk of which centered on the authenticity of the code itself.

The message structure couldn’t just substitute the moaning of a whale or a crying seal for As and Bs or even whole words. In addition, the sounds Navy technicians recorded between 1959 and 1965 all had natural background noise. With the technology available, it would have been hard to scrub that out. Repeated blasts of the same sounds with identical extra noise would stand out to even untrained sonar operators.

In the end, it didn’t work.

The Future of Drone Warfare

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/10/the-future-of-drone-warfare.html

Ukraine is using $400 drones to destroy tanks:

Facing an enemy with superior numbers of troops and armor, the Ukrainian defenders are holding on with the help of tiny drones flown by operators like Firsov that, for a few hundred dollars, can deliver an explosive charge capable of destroying a Russian tank worth more than $2 million.

[…]

A typical FPV weighs up to one kilogram, has four small engines, a battery, a frame and a camera connected wirelessly to goggles worn by a pilot operating it remotely. It can carry up to 2.5 kilograms of explosives and strike a target at a speed of up to 150 kilometers per hour, explains Pavlo Tsybenko, acting director of the Dronarium military academy outside Kyiv.

“This drone costs up to $400 and can be made anywhere. We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress. We made the carbon frame ourselves. And, yeah, the batteries are from Tesla. One car has like 1,100 batteries that can be used to power these little guys,” Tsybenko told POLITICO on a recent visit, showing the custom-made FPV drones used by the academy to train future drone pilots.

“It is almost impossible to shoot it down,” he said. “Only a net can help. And I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.”

Science fiction authors have been writing about drone swarms for decades. Now they are reality. Tanks today. Soon it will be ships (probably with more expensive drones). Feels like this will be a major change in warfare.

China Hacked Japan’s Military Networks

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/china-hacked-japans-military-networks.html

The NSA discovered the intrusion in 2020—we don’t know how—and alerted the Japanese. The Washington Post has the story:

The hackers had deep, persistent access and appeared to be after anything they could get their hands on—plans, capabilities, assessments of military shortcomings, according to three former senior U.S. officials, who were among a dozen current and former U.S. and Japanese officials interviewed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

[…]

The 2020 penetration was so disturbing that Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, and Matthew Pottinger, who was White House deputy national security adviser at the time, raced to Tokyo. They briefed the defense minister, who was so concerned that he arranged for them to alert the prime minister himself.

Beijing, they told the Japanese officials, had breached Tokyo’s defense networks, making it one of the most damaging hacks in that country’s modern history.

More analysis.

More Military Cryptanalytics, Part III

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/08/more-military-cryptanalytics-part-iii.html

Late last year, the NSA declassified and released a redacted version of Lambros D. Callimahos’s Military Cryptanalytics, Part III. We just got most of the index. It’s hard to believe that there are any real secrets left in this 44-year-old volume.

Military Cryptanalytics, Part III

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/01/military-cryptanalytics-part-iii.html

The NSA has just declassified and released a redacted version of Military Cryptanalytics, Part III, by Lambros D. Callimahos, October 1977.

Parts I and II, by Lambros D. Callimahos and William F. Friedman, were released decades ago — I believe repeatedly, in increasingly unredacted form — and published by the late Wayne Griswold Barker’s Agean Park Press. I own them in hardcover.

Like Parts I and II, Part III is primarily concerned with pre-computer ciphers. At this point, the document only has historical interest. If there is any lesson for today, it’s that modern cryptanalysis is possible primarily because people make mistakes

The monograph took a while to become public. The cover page says that the initial FOIA request was made in July 2012: eight and a half years ago.

And there’s more books to come. Page 1 starts off:

This text constitutes the third of six basic texts on the science of cryptanalytics. The first two texts together have covered most of the necessary fundamentals of cryptanalytics; this and the remaining three texts will be devoted to more specialized and more advanced aspects of the science.

Presumably, volumes IV, V, and VI are still hidden inside the classified libraries of the NSA.

And from page ii:

Chapters IV-XI are revisions of seven of my monographs in the NSA Technical Literature Series, viz: Monograph No. 19, “The Cryptanalysis of Ciphertext and Plaintext Autokey Systems”; Monograph No. 20, “The Analysis of Systems Employing Long or Continuous Keys”; Monograph No. 21, “The Analysis of Cylindrical Cipher Devices and Strip Cipher Systems”; Monograph No. 22, “The Analysis of Systems Employing Geared Disk Cryptomechanisms”; Monograph No.23, “Fundamentals of Key Analysis”; Monograph No. 15, “An Introduction to Teleprinter Key Analysis”; and Monograph No. 18, “Ars Conjectandi: The Fundamentals of Cryptodiagnosis.”

This points to a whole series of still-classified monographs whose titles we do not even know.

EDITED TO ADD: I have been informed by a reliable source that Parts 4 through 6 were never completed. There may be fragments and notes, but no finished works.

The US Military Buys Commercial Location Data

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/11/the-us-military-buys-commercial-location-data.html

Vice has a long article about how the US military buys commercial location data worldwide.

The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a “level” app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.

This isn’t new, this isn’t just data of non-US citizens, and this isn’t the US military. We have lots of instances where the government buys data that it cannot legally collect itself.

Some app developers Motherboard spoke to were not aware who their users’ location data ends up with, and even if a user examines an app’s privacy policy, they may not ultimately realize how many different industries, companies, or government agencies are buying some of their most sensitive data. U.S. law enforcement purchase of such information has raised questions about authorities buying their way to location data that may ordinarily require a warrant to access. But the USSOCOM contract and additional reporting is the first evidence that U.S. location data purchases have extended from law enforcement to military agencies.