Military Embedded Systems

The need to enable rapid deployment capabilities for the warfighter is driving increased demand for resilient and secure communication systems in dynamic environments. Recent conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere have reinforced what U.S. Department of Defense leaders have known for several years: that command posts have to be mobile to be survivable. They must be distributed over different areas and be able to set up rapidly for information-sharing and decision support without putting the post in jeopardy as an easily identifiable target on a map. The opportunity now: fielding turnkey, easy-to-use unified network operations that operate optimally on the move in the toughest deployment environments.

Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling adversaries to build new attacks faster and evade signature-based threat detection with ease. The cutting edge of adversarial cybersecurity is becoming more sophisticated, using new technologies to rapidly develop new attacks. Defensive cybersecurity efforts must keep pace with bad actors by using new tools that combine attack signal intelligence with pattern-matching capabilities to identify polymorphic threats, or cyberthreats that employ evasive techniques to evade detection from traditional security solutions.

Military wireless networks in the military can be secured through the proven use of NSA-approved Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) encryption. CSfC is a set of approved architectures using two layers of commercial encryption (as opposed to Type 1 military-only encryption) for access to classified networks. The layers, software and/or hardware, must be developed independently and validated to international Common Criteria standards. Today, it’s possible to rapidly set up a mobile, extendable wireless network qualified to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 9 [denoting that a technology has been “flight proven” during a successful mission]; using Wi-Fi 6, multi-­hundreds of megabits of throughput can be rapidly deployed in the field.

Digital keys are a core concept in establishing secure networks, one as relevant in a data center application as it is at the edge of the tactical battlefield. While cryptography (crypto) uses both symmetric and asymmetric keys for different functions, for this column we’ll focus on asymmetric cryptography in which different keys are used for locking and unlocking.

The vision of hardware interoperability at the tactical edge, from air platforms to ground vehicles to base stations, is now being realized. Because MOSA [modular open systems approach] is an approach and not itself a standard, solutions that support this vision can be achieved through many different means as long as interfaces and communications protocols are based on open standards. There remains a key area to address, though, to achieve seamless interoperability between heterogeneous systems. Consider, for example, the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Technical Standard: While most aspects of sensor processing system architectures are well-defined within SOSA, one area that has not been rigidly defined is the network configuration and operational environment of individual cards and modules.

A software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) can establish a data fabric capable of dealing with any tactical edge scenario where reliable WAN is needed.