The military’s future plan to create a technical cloud that would allow common control of all the branches drones is a great idea! But dear God please tell me the security on this system, (and R&D) will be off the chart to keep Chinese hackers out of the loop.
According to a US Navy release:
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has developed something similar to a master remote control for military ground, air and undersea unmanned systems that will work across the services, as outlined in a new video released, May 2. (Above)
This Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) prescribed data model is a piece of software that enabled development of the Common Control System, which is comprised of many different common control services.
Chinese hackers have run roughshod over allied military designers and contractors. Even QinetiQ North America, a world leading defense and security company that creates secret satellites, drones, and Special Forces software was hacked by Chinese infiltrators.
For three years Chinese hackers pilfered research and development secrets from the company:
“We found traces of the intruders in many of their divisions and across most of their product lines. There was virtually no place we looked where we didn’t find them,” said Christopher Day whose security company was hired by QinetiQ to investigate the break-ins.
Integrating inter-service drone command, control and communication will bring unprecedented capabilities to our drone forces. But security from conception HAS TO BE priority number one.
Something like Security oriented Design should be implemented. The security aspect should be in the picture not at the testing phase but during design phase it self.
Should be something like Test Driven Development where you write all the security tests to fail and start writing your code passing ach one of them.
Penetrating an Unified command & control is a worst case scenario.
Back in my engineering days, this was known as a “Single Point of Failure.” Google it.