US reassures India on military aid to Pakistan

[VAJRA]

Haha, man no point in replying to them. Just kids.

Haha, no point explaining cos you just can't!

 

[Donatello]

Really!

care to explain the "far far away" link/device and something that may not be communicated by internal systems of the plane through the sat link by itself?

Schizophrenic - hmmmm!

US must have a source or a way to link up with the F-16 they want to "Kill"....that is turn the computer off. Now these jets have quite complex computer dealing with all sorts of system with each sub-system having their micro-processors.

Like Radar, Engine controllers, flight hydraulic controls, IRST, FLIR etc etc. How will you reach these systems? By Radio Control?

In order to use radio waves to kill the F-16, you need to send radio waves from somewhere, assuming USA is sending them from somewhere near Arabian sea (i.e. Aircraft carrier ). Now the F-16 must have an antenna in it to receive it and there must be a second circuit somewhere in the avionics that would override the Pilot's own settings. By careful investigation it can be found.

Not to mention that avionics of F-16s come from so many different contractors, so while you may be killing one subsystem you may not kill the other...........now why would USA go for such a huge task for no reason? Does USA care if Indian Migs are shot down? I don't think so.

Last, we have been and other nations have been operating f-16s for 20 years, no such instance have been found.


F-16s don't communicate over internet that you can just simply hack into.


kill switches....my ***.

---------- Post added at 09:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:19 PM ----------

Haha, no point explaining cos you just can't!

.....or your pea sized brain ain't big enough to comprehend it.........refer to my above post.

 

[VAJRA]

US must have a source or a way to link up with the F-16 they want to "Kill"....that is turn the computer off. Now these jets have quite complex computer dealing with all sorts of system with each sub-system having their micro-processors.

Like Radar, Engine controllers, flight hydraulic controls, IRST, FLIR etc etc. How will you reach these systems? By Radio Control?

In order to use radio waves to kill the F-16, you need to send radio waves from somewhere, assuming USA is sending them from somewhere near Arabian sea (i.e. Aircraft carrier ). Now the F-16 must have an antenna in it to receive it and there must be a second circuit somewhere in the avionics that would override the Pilot's own settings. By careful investigation it can be found.

Not to mention that avionics of F-16s come from so many different contractors, so while you may be killing one subsystem you may not kill the other...........now why would USA go for such a huge task for no reason? Does USA care if Indian Migs are shot down? I don't think so.

Last, we have been and other nations have been operating f-16s for 20 years, no such instance have been found.


F-16s don't communicate over internet that you can just simply hack into.


kill switches....my ***.

---------- Post added at 09:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:19 PM ----------



.....or your pea sized brain ain't big enough to comprehend it.........refer to my above post.

IEEE Spectrum: The Hunt for the Kill Switch

Last September, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear installation in northeastern Syria. Among the many mysteries still surrounding that strike was the failure of a Syrian radar--supposedly state-of-the-art--to warn the Syrian military of the incoming assault. It wasn't long before military and technology bloggers concluded that this was an incident of electronic warfare--and not just any kind.
Post after post speculated that the commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors in the Syrian radar might have been purposely fabricated with a hidden ”backdoor” inside. By sending a preprogrammed code to those chips, an unknown antagonist had disrupted the chips' function and temporarily blocked the radar.
That same basic scenario is cropping up more frequently lately, and not just in the Middle East, where conspiracy theories abound. According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a ”European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, ”the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
Feeding those dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can contain an ”insane number” of chips, says one semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward. The dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like China, has only deepened the U.S. military's concern.
Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military--and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F-35--a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.
Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can't be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can't afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone's various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn't interfere with the chip's normal functions won't show up in these tests.
”You don't check for the infinite possible things that are not specified,” says electrical engineering professor Ruby Lee, a cryptography expert at Princeton. ”You could check the obvious possibilities, but can you test for every unspecified function?”
Nor can chip makers afford to test every chip. From a batch of thousands, technicians select a single chip for physical inspection, assuming that the manufacturing process has yielded essentially identical devices. They then laboriously grind away a thin layer of the chip, put the chip into a scanning electron microscope, and then take a picture of it, repeating the process until every layer of the chip has been imaged. Even here, spotting a tiny discrepancy amid a chip's many layers and millions or billions of transistors is a fantastically difficult task, and the chip is destroyed in the process.
But the military can't really work that way. For ICs destined for mission-critical systems, you'd ideally want to test every chip without destroying it.
The upshot is that the Trust program's challenge is enormous. ”We can all do with more verification,” says Samsung's Victoria Coleman, who helped create the Cyber Trust initiative to secure congressional support for cybersecurity. ”My advice to [DARPA director] Tony Tether was ’trust but verify.' That's all you can do.”
Semiconductor offshoring dates back to the 1960s, when U.S. chip makers began moving the labor-intensive assembly and testing stages to Singapore, Taiwan, and other countries with educated workforces and relatively inexpensive labor.
Today only Intel and a few other companies still design and manufacture all their own chips in their own fabrication plants. Other chip designers--including LSI Corp. and most recently Sony--have gone ”fabless,” outsourcing their manufacturing to offshore facilities known as foundries. In doing so, they avoid the huge expense of building a state-of-the-art fab, which in 2007 cost as much as US $2 billion to $4 billion.
Well into the 1970s, the U.S. military's status as one of the largest consumers of integrated circuits gave it some control over the industry's production and manufacturing, so the offshoring trend didn't pose a big problem. The Pentagon could always find a domestic fab and pay a little more to make highly classified and mission-critical chips. The DOD also maintained its own chip-making plant at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., until the early 1980s, when costs became prohibitive.
But these days, the U.S. military consumes only about 1 percent of the world's integrated circuits. ”Now,” says Coleman, ”all they can do is buy stuff.” Nearly every military system today contains some commercial hardware. It's a pretty sure bet that the National Security Agency doesn't fabricate its encryption chips in China. But no entity, no matter how well funded, can afford to manufacture its own safe version of every chip in every piece of equipment.
The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. ”The economy is globalized, but defense is not globalized,” says Coleman. ”How do you reconcile the two?”
In 2004, the Defense Department created the Trusted Foundries Program to try to ensure an unbroken supply of secure microchips for the government. DOD inspectors have now certified certain commercial chip plants, such as IBM's Burlington, Vt., facility, as trusted foundries. These plants are then contracted to supply a set number of chips to the Pentagon each year. But Coleman argues that the program blesses a process, not a product. And, she says, the Defense Department's assumption that onshore assembly is more secure than offshore reveals a blind spot. ”Why can't people put something bad into the chips made right here?” she says.

READ UP AND OPEN UP TO UNKNOWNS - Something your pea sized brain really needs!

Again - be specific and rule out the possibility - its the basis of a strong hypothesis testing! ever heard of that?

Plaguing a system with a KILL SWITCH - OH YEAH IT IS VERY MUCH POSSIBLE!

 

[Neither Right Nor Wrong]

Nope - All they can do is track the jet location using GPS and they can do it pretty much on any jet as everything runs on GPS.The question of such device which will blow something or just disable is just not possible.What you're suggesting is that American supplies AMRAAM and Jet radar codes to India in war which won't happen as America tends to stay neutral during war.If any single equipment is found with kill switch half of American's defense export would crumble.This is all movies stuff and of course some of it comes right wing cowrd.

Tell me how is that possible ?..one usually installs a GPS receiver and not a GPS emitter in one's car or plane..functioning of GPS is similar to RF being broadcasted by a Radio station...Navstar satellites emit a microwave signal ..if your receiver is on, it will catch the signal and tell you your position..just like if your radio is it will catch RF signals..and you can listen to radio..but you can't point find position of the radio from radio tower.

 

[ganimi kawa]

There is no such thing as kill switch in the F-16s. Even if it was, it would need to communicate with the device from far far away, meaning, there would be extra communications link/antenna on board which any PAF electrical/aerospace engineer could find and investigate.


Schizophrenic Indian kids.......tch tch...wet dreaming.

1. No need for extra communication link/ antenna; do you think the americans are bufoons ? They can very well use the standard comm gear on the f16.

2. Do you think that the jamming signal will come from washington ? I can't believe how naive people can be!

3. The so called "kill switch " is mainly a software thing. Do you have the source codes with you? ( It's nothing but a software, you know )

4. Note that these concern were mainly raised by your pakistani brothers. Are they also schizophreniacs?

 

[flanker143]

imposition of sanctions "might" limit the use of f 16 to some weeks of war due to lack of spares ...... if there are no so called "kill switches".....

 

[Donatello]

IEEE Spectrum: The Hunt for the Kill Switch

Last September, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear installation in northeastern Syria. Among the many mysteries still surrounding that strike was the failure of a Syrian radar--supposedly state-of-the-art--to warn the Syrian military of the incoming assault. It wasn't long before military and technology bloggers concluded that this was an incident of electronic warfare--and not just any kind.
Post after post speculated that the commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors in the Syrian radar might have been purposely fabricated with a hidden ”backdoor” inside. By sending a preprogrammed code to those chips, an unknown antagonist had disrupted the chips' function and temporarily blocked the radar.
That same basic scenario is cropping up more frequently lately, and not just in the Middle East, where conspiracy theories abound. According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a ”European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, ”the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
Feeding those dreams is the Pentagon's realization that it no longer controls who manufactures the components that go into its increasingly complex systems. A single plane like the DOD's next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, can contain an ”insane number” of chips, says one semiconductor expert familiar with that aircraft's design. Estimates from other sources put the total at several hundred to more than a thousand. And tracing a part back to its source is not always straightforward. The dwindling of domestic chip and electronics manufacturing in the United States, combined with the phenomenal growth of suppliers in countries like China, has only deepened the U.S. military's concern.
Recognizing this enormous vulnerability, the DOD recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. In December, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military--and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F-35--a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. In January, the Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry. The teams have until the end of this month to ferret out as many of the devious insertions as they can.
Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can't be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can't afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone's various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn't interfere with the chip's normal functions won't show up in these tests.
”You don't check for the infinite possible things that are not specified,” says electrical engineering professor Ruby Lee, a cryptography expert at Princeton. ”You could check the obvious possibilities, but can you test for every unspecified function?”
Nor can chip makers afford to test every chip. From a batch of thousands, technicians select a single chip for physical inspection, assuming that the manufacturing process has yielded essentially identical devices. They then laboriously grind away a thin layer of the chip, put the chip into a scanning electron microscope, and then take a picture of it, repeating the process until every layer of the chip has been imaged. Even here, spotting a tiny discrepancy amid a chip's many layers and millions or billions of transistors is a fantastically difficult task, and the chip is destroyed in the process.
But the military can't really work that way. For ICs destined for mission-critical systems, you'd ideally want to test every chip without destroying it.
The upshot is that the Trust program's challenge is enormous. ”We can all do with more verification,” says Samsung's Victoria Coleman, who helped create the Cyber Trust initiative to secure congressional support for cybersecurity. ”My advice to [DARPA director] Tony Tether was ’trust but verify.' That's all you can do.”
Semiconductor offshoring dates back to the 1960s, when U.S. chip makers began moving the labor-intensive assembly and testing stages to Singapore, Taiwan, and other countries with educated workforces and relatively inexpensive labor.
Today only Intel and a few other companies still design and manufacture all their own chips in their own fabrication plants. Other chip designers--including LSI Corp. and most recently Sony--have gone ”fabless,” outsourcing their manufacturing to offshore facilities known as foundries. In doing so, they avoid the huge expense of building a state-of-the-art fab, which in 2007 cost as much as US $2 billion to $4 billion.
Well into the 1970s, the U.S. military's status as one of the largest consumers of integrated circuits gave it some control over the industry's production and manufacturing, so the offshoring trend didn't pose a big problem. The Pentagon could always find a domestic fab and pay a little more to make highly classified and mission-critical chips. The DOD also maintained its own chip-making plant at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., until the early 1980s, when costs became prohibitive.
But these days, the U.S. military consumes only about 1 percent of the world's integrated circuits. ”Now,” says Coleman, ”all they can do is buy stuff.” Nearly every military system today contains some commercial hardware. It's a pretty sure bet that the National Security Agency doesn't fabricate its encryption chips in China. But no entity, no matter how well funded, can afford to manufacture its own safe version of every chip in every piece of equipment.
The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. ”The economy is globalized, but defense is not globalized,” says Coleman. ”How do you reconcile the two?”
In 2004, the Defense Department created the Trusted Foundries Program to try to ensure an unbroken supply of secure microchips for the government. DOD inspectors have now certified certain commercial chip plants, such as IBM's Burlington, Vt., facility, as trusted foundries. These plants are then contracted to supply a set number of chips to the Pentagon each year. But Coleman argues that the program blesses a process, not a product. And, she says, the Defense Department's assumption that onshore assembly is more secure than offshore reveals a blind spot. ”Why can't people put something bad into the chips made right here?” she says.

READ UP AND OPEN UP TO UNKNOWNS - Something your pea sized brain really needs!

Again - be specific and rule out the possibility - its the basis of a strong hypothesis testing! ever heard of that?

Plaguing a system with a KILL SWITCH - OH YEAH IT IS VERY MUCH POSSIBLE!

This article mentions Syrian Radars, which as they say were made up of off the shelf components. Radars were linked by simple communications method which were easier to jam into, as they mention in the article that it was a case more of a electronic jamming thing.


The article doesn't mention any aircraft that have reportedly been kill-switched nor does it mention f-16s.


Let alone f-16s against IAF, which USA wouldn't care about.


Last, as i said, in order to activate the kill-switch you need to access it via some link, which may be radio links. Considering Turkey might have some of the blueprints as they assembled f-16s are doing the MLU for PAF ones, they may already know the inside of it.


Lastly, the article you provided ends the discussion on the fact that so many contractors are there that USA itself doesn't know which contractor would be doing what. Let alone USA itself putting kill-switches in PAF f-16s to appease India.

 

[Donatello]

imposition of sanctions "might" limit the use of f 16 to some weeks of war due to lack of spares ...... if there are no so called "kill switches".....

Why are you indians so concerned about f-16s? I wish i was in India when PAF was receiving F-16s to see the fear on your faces......


formidable foe PAF is right?


I mean, spares? PAF is buying extra of them, actually 7 spare engines like whole units. You always buy "Stores" which means spare parts, equipment with such deals.


Are you just stupid or act stupid?

You think they will use 500 BVR AAMs in few weeks? We have JF-17s, Mirage and F-7s to do the job as well.


If PAF actually used it's entire stock of AAMs, IAF would be actually down to maybe one or two jets only.....



at least think before you post.

 

[Break the Silence]

To Indian And Pakistani Mates!!!
USA will not ban the use of these war toys against India. it happened in past...If it will do the same...that only posible after a significant loss to both sides...It doesnot wish South Asia to be prosper..
Mark my words..USA playing a very dirty game with two neighbours..

 

[Donatello]

1. No need for extra communication link/ antenna; do you think the americans are bufoons ? They can very well use the standard comm gear on the f16.

2. Do you think that the jamming signal will come from washington ? I can't believe how naive people can be!

3. The so called "kill switch " is mainly a software thing. Do you have the source codes with you? ( It's nothing but a software, you know )

4. Note that these concern were mainly raised by your pakistani brothers. Are they also schizophreniacs?

And how do you plan on executing your software? You will walk with a USB thumb drive in your hands and plug it in? Forget it ....its not that simple as you Indians would like to dream.

And software, which again is made by different contractors......

 

[AbuSalam]

another Kill switch theory ...
weren't the aircrafts position in long & lat be enough ? whenever the aircraft enters the programmed "position" the aircraft will self destruct...can also be incorporated in JF17 to deter them from attacking friendly countries to Pakistan.

 

[ganimi kawa]

The article doesn't mention any aircraft that have reportedly been kill-switched nor does it mention f-16s.

Mate, your concept of a kill switch is based on Tom Clancey style novels. The aircraft does not fall out of the sky when " kill switched " . It performs sub optimally thus vulnurable to enemy. Secondly no country will ever pproclaim to have kill switched a military equipment. So there will be no official record at least on the "kill switching" side.

 

[Donatello]

another Kill switch theory ...
weren't the aircrafts position in long & lat be enough ? whenever the aircraft enters the programmed "position" the aircraft will self destruct...can also be incorporated in JF17 to deter them from attacking friendly countries to Pakistan.

Self-destruct? WHAT?

now does it have explosives tied to it as well?



Lastly, as i said, it's not impossible but chances are as rare as finding a needle in a haystack..in case of PAF f-16s.

We have been using them for the past 30 years......so you better stop believing conspiracy theorists, which whether Pakistanis or Indians, i don't care much about.

 

[ganimi kawa]

And how do you plan on executing your software? You will walk with a USB thumb drive in your hands and plug it in? Forget it ....its not that simple as you Indians would like to dream.

And software, which again is made by different contractors......

It is not "my" software , It's America we are talking about.

All the kid stuff about usb just goes to show your immaturity.

Source code, is made by US........ let me repeat US ! Stop fantasizing about Turkey or someone else helping you with it. If you believe so discussion is over from my side!

 

[AbuSalam]

another Kill switch theory ...
weren't the aircrafts position in long & lat be enough ? whenever the aircraft enters the programmed "position" the aircraft will self destruct...can also be incorporated in JF17 to deter them from attacking friendly countries to Pakistan.

did any Pak F16 cross the border to INDIA..just to make sure