Military Weapons Must Be Cyber Secured

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The rise of an increasingly multipolar world with highly capable cyber adversaries has brought about a shift in the focus of the US National Security Agency’s Cybersecurity Directorate. Protecting US weapons systems from cyber threats has become one of its top priorities

While in Afghanistan, the US military systems were not targeted by the foe, because it lacked the technical capability, near-peer adversaries such as China and Russia have such capabilities, claims NSA’s Rob Joyce. He added that Iran and North Korea remain a concern as increasingly capable cyber adversaries.

The Defense Department’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is envisioned to be a large network — or an interconnected network of service-specific networks — that will rely on many traditional information technologies. As such, allowing these networks and their components to be compromised would pose a grave threat to warfighters’ safety and their ability to conduct missions.

The threat is not theoretical nor is the risk abstract, as the military learned last October when it “failed” in a wargame against an “aggressive red team” meant to emulate China or Russia. Weapons systems fall under the umbrella of a special class of government information technology called National Security Systems (NSS), which have always been the predominant domestic purview of NSA’s cybersecurity efforts. So the shift in focus is an acknowledgment that the US faces more technologically savvy cyber actors who could — and probably already are — looking for cyber vulnerabilities in these systems.

NSA’s other top priorities include “understanding nation-states’ intentions” and developing next-generation cryptologic systems that will still protect secrets amid the widely predicted advent of quantum computing, particularly via post-quantum cryptography, according to breakingdefense.com citing Joyce.