UK drones sending data to China

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"Heartbeat" messages are only to ensure the connectivity is working, so it suggests the existence of code to send more expansive messages back to the Chinese system. They need the source code analysed.
 
lindsay said:
They need the source code analysed.
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I'd hope that, these days, every piece of code in British military systems would be taken to pieces by those nice people in Cheltenham.

Still, that's the story of British military history, since the start of the 19th Century: buy cheap when things are going well then panic buy when it starts to turn upside down. :thinking:
 
It's, however, not realistic to scan source code routinely, instead they assess and identify threat vectors and test for them. I've never yet met a GCHQ-certified security analyst who looked at code. However I'd like to think that after this discovery, they will have drilled down into the message structures to identify potential.
 
lindsay said:
It's, however, not realistic to scan source code routinely...
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My experience is now ten years out of date, so I'm making an assumption from what I did back then.

A lot of my time was spent taking systems apart, to figure out what my predecessors "hadn't" done. I appreciate that the advent of graphic operating systems has made the code base a great deal larger and more complicated. On the other hand, there were a fair number of tools available back then, such as disassemblers.

I would have thought that similar tools are the model for much of what Cheltenham would be doing now, to "their" stuff as well as to "ours".
 
This sort of testing is done by independent specialists usually with CESG accreditation (CESG is a GCHQ certification group). Even in the MoD I suspect they don't routinely get a division in GCHQ to pore over products, especially sub-contracted ones, unless there is specific reason to do so (which there now will be, of course).
 
I should have thought that checking the code in fine detail would be a task for suitably trained AI - it should be able to do it more quickly and possibly more thoroughly (though with less imagination) than a human.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I should have thought that checking the code in fine detail would be a task for suitably trained AI - it should be able to do it more quickly and possibly more thoroughly (though with less imagination) than a human.
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They could use Chinese AI :D
 
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