in a way, Trump is actually succeeding in getting NATO member countries to reach the 2% GDP commitment for military spending… by scaring countries into arming themselves against the United States.

it’s like convincing your friend to install an alarm system by threatening to rob them at gunpoint.

I’m too much of a coward, honestly. I’m trans, so if I get arrested I’ll be made to detransition and sent to a men’s prison and assigned to a violent criminal as his prison wife. I’ll serve Canada though, if it comes to it.

right, you said it was stupid because:

Just imagine that you’re in a conflict, then the enemy hacks your command and control systems and disables/hijacks all of your aircraft. Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.

I’m saying that scenario wouldn’t be possible. for the enemy to exploit a backdoor like this, they’d have to either:

1. break the encryption (quantum computer, classical sub-exponential discrete log or factoring algorithm.)
2. break the protocol or encryption (unlikely, since it’d be simple, the NSA is full of competent cryptographers, and they’d probably formally verify it to EAL-5.)
3. steal the private key (most likely imo, but the government also safeguards the nuclear codes, and it’s hard for me to imagine F-35 kill switch keys being more dangerous than those.)

I don’t think any of the above are very likely, or at least not likely enough to outweigh the strategic benefit of being able to ground your enemy’s air force in the (hitherto unlikely) scenario one of the US’s customers became its enemy. so I don’t think it’s stupid, and I don’t think I straw-manned you.

crypto ignition keys (CIKs) are just setup tools to load bootstrap keys into a device.

like, for instance, if you’ve just unboxed a secure telephone, there’s no keys in it, so you have to use a CIK to load keys/ciphers into the phone before you can make calls from it.

the private sector doesn’t use them much, but NSA invented them and they’ve been a staple of IC infra for decades.

for someone with two decades of infosec experience, it’s alarming you’d overlook asymmetric cryptography. it’s simple to build an unhackable kill switch using basic cryptographic primitives, unless you think the enemy has a quantum computer.

Every serious defence analyst has laughed at the idea that the F-35 has a secret killswitch. This would be the dumbest thing ever to include in an aircraft, because there is always the possibility that your enemies could find out about it.

just cryptographically sign the kill switch transmission. the fighter would contain the public key to verify, but enemies would need the private key to trigger it, which the NSA would keep buried in cold storage like the DUAL-EC-DRBG trapdoor key.

you’d probably also want to include the fighter’s serial number or IFF transponder code, so the enemy couldn’t capture or replay.

Consider; if an F-35 kill switch did exist, any buyer of the craft could invest the resources required to go over every inch of circuit and line of code and find it, and then deactivate every US F-35.

there’s something like 100M LoC of C++ (not Ada 😥) in an F-35. and Canada doesn’t have the sources, so they’d have to decompile that. maybe they could focus on the radios, radar and other devices direct connection to receivers, but the implant might be downstream, and there’s a lot of ways to hide an antenna.

even dumping the chips isn’t easy. many of them likely have security features, since they contain classified algorithms which the DoD would rather enemies not be able to extract from the downed wreckage of a fighter. certainly the JTAG pins are not going to be enabled. even die shots could be frustrated by metal meshes over the wafer or possibly even microscopic amounts of explosives triggered by de-lidding.

But this “killswitch” nonsense just derails that important discussion into paranoid conspiracy theorist nonsense rooted in the deranged ramblings of a self-aggrandizing madman.

there’s secure ways to build a kill switch, there’s an abundance of places to hide it in a highly complex fighter, and this kind of spooky stuff is well within the NSA’s wheelhouse. it’s the kind of thing NSA is known for, even - the Crypto AG CIA front, the DUAL-EC-DRBG backdoor, TAO’s clandestine program to intercept and backdoor mailed routers and servers. they clearly can do this kind of thing, since they clearly have before.

did they backdoor the F-35? I don’t know, but it’s plausible, and CSIS/CSE should investigate.

it’s going to be increasingly hard for CA to justify US as a safe harbor for LGBT people when the US has literally erased the T, and is starting even to block trans people from obtaining US visas. not that I’m terribly optimistic that CA will even bother justifying it.