from the cost-of-thumbdrives-reaches-all-time-high dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives
The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS) has reportedly replaced the ancient eight-inch floppy disks it uses to store data on the US nuclear arsenal.
Defense news site C4ISRNET today cites officers from the Air Force 595th Strategic Communications Squadron – the unit that actually manages the system – in reporting that earlier this summer, the antiquated IBM floppy drives were replaced with what was described as a "highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."
[...] The eight inch disks, developed in the 1960s at IBM's San Jose skunkworks, each held about 80KB of data on the current state of the nation's nuclear forces. The drives had been among the units slated for replacement as part of a "modernization" effort.
Emphasis on the quote marks, as in this case there is still plenty of 1970s tech that is going to continue being used. The report notes that the Air Force favors the Series/1 machine for SACCS in part because the ancient machine cannot be accessed with conventional network protocols, adding extra layers of security to the program.
(Score: 2, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Saturday October 19 2019, @02:28AM (2 children)
Now all they need to do is figure out how to get them out of Turkey!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @02:54AM
I’m sure they can be launched anytime.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 19 2019, @05:49AM
Easy, just don't pardon them on Christmas this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @02:48AM (2 children)
Hopefully it will have a USB type A connector so that it will be impossible to plug in, thereby saving the world from nuclear holocaust.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Saturday October 19 2019, @03:02AM
They finally fix USB and it ends up blowing up the world. Sounds about right.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday October 20 2019, @12:17AM
It's not. Sheesh, this SACCS we're talking about here, it's a 32MB compact flash card formatted as FAT16. They were originally going to use 8MB SmartMedia cards, but were having trouble sourcing the readers from the factory in Albania.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday October 19 2019, @03:04AM (1 child)
"highly-secure solid state digital storage solution."
So, in other words, a GoTek Floppy emulator, or similar.
Whatever their solution, it is not exactly common commodity equipment, so what will they replace it with further down the road when THIS stuff becomes "antiquated"?
They should get with the consumertardastic times and replace it all with a smart phone and put their data in teh cloud. Then tweeter-in-chief can just text the launch codes directly.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 21 2019, @03:04PM
The latter scenario is a terrifying thought.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday October 19 2019, @03:04AM (5 children)
I am not quite convinced if this was the best idea to perform. In a floppy disk media, there is no CPU hiding inside. The floppy controller is a separate device from the media. If the controller is audited for a critical system, it never changes, it is a fixpoint in the math sense. And changeable data on media can be verified independently on the critical device, by another device possibly unconnected to critical system. That makes composition of both almost deterministic. With an SSD, this is turned into probabilistic device. There could be anything crazy lurking inside the SSD controller, waiting for some funny changes, and memory part itself is not deterministic enough physically, making it literally impossible to verify the whole contraption for desired stability and predictability for future behavior. A missing separation of data and function is a risk.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Saturday October 19 2019, @03:15AM (3 children)
As someone who owns an 8" drive and 8" floppies, I'd feel much safer with such a critical system using floppies than some "modern" shit filled with who-knows-what Chinese garbage inside.
8" disks were actually quite reliable, as long as they weren't the awful "Wabash" brand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @03:39AM (1 child)
Seconded, don't have them anymore, but our S-100 bus CP/M system with two single sided 8" floppies (600kB each?) was very reliable for quite a few years. The drives spun all the time that a floppy was installed, no spin-up time and access was pretty snappy.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday October 19 2019, @03:54AM
I had a pair of Calcomp model 100.
On an IMSAI 8080.
FD1771 FDC. Homebrew.
Beautiful machines.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @06:00PM
i doubt they will use commodity, chinese malware, but i still agree with the idea that moving to SSDs for nukes is scary. SSDs are finicky little bastards.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 19 2019, @02:26PM
Shouldn't we just put it in the cloud? Why bother with floppies, or hard drives, or SSD's when MicroGoogazon can do it all for us?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday October 19 2019, @04:03AM (1 child)
I don't know about the other branches, but before the turn of the century sections of the USAF had migrated from 8" floppies long before the missile squads. Around the year 2000, USAF squads involving aircraft had already long replaced their 8" floppy drives with the familiar 3 1/2" floppies and 250MB zip drives when mission-critical data had to be stored on something big.
The interpretation is: Since missileers were upgraded so late, then nobody expects that missileers would ever actually have to do their jobs. And if you don't want to die in nuclular fire, I'd say that's a good thing.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday October 19 2019, @05:27AM
Have you ever heard about RVSN RF advertising campaign for Europe?
They used to have slogan which translates rougly as "We are not GazProm, but we too bring light and warm to your homes."
One of those overhelming Russian strategic internet manipulations, you know...
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Saturday October 19 2019, @05:42AM (3 children)
People make fun of ancient tech, but: after 50 or 60 years, it's still working. n systems like this, reliability is the top priority. Who remembers the incident in Russia, where they had a launch warning that US missiles were inbound? Pretty much only the (non)-action of one Russian officer, insisting it had to be a system error, prevented a counter-launch.
However, eventually replacement parts get ridiculously expensive, or even completely impossible to produce. Change has to happen. Going from 8-inch floppies to SSDs - that's skipping just a few generations.
I wonder where the US aims its missile, nowadays, and why...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday October 19 2019, @05:53AM
Righto, US not able to produce a dam'd floppy drive anymore but they have some old missiles still.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @05:56AM
Towards the Switzerland because of the banking secrecy. After all, what's one single missile anyway?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 21 2019, @03:09PM
I would say, anyone who we think might have the ability or a reason to launch at us. Russia and China are the two on the top of that list as far as I would know. Perhaps, they aren't first in line, but I doubt there's no plan for that hypothetical scenario.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Saturday October 19 2019, @07:07AM (1 child)
I share this Tengu's view. Securing something like a motherboard, cpu, ram or ssd now that they all have multiple layers of onboard processing at the device level, when each of those layers can have a carefully placed glitch, put there precisely for this reason, is difficult.
Does anyone know where these ssds are being purchased? Who does the auditing?
Say if a country wanted to do a zero day cyclon-alpha strike on the united states, they would want all the cloud architecture in their country, all the hardware and software designed in their country, and multiple kill switches for various essential services in their country. Oh and to design all of the encryption software used by the military. And control the highest levels of both key political parties, and allow spy operatives to move freely and traffic children in a blackmail scheme, with a backdoor into every cell phone. Oh and control the mass media channels, give free airtime to the biggest idiot running for leadership office, and have him give their country free land.
Sadly, there is one country that is doing exactly this, I will let you guess which. Even more sad is the entire staff of the pentagon appears oblivious or is taking a cut. It would be nice if the United States started working for people who lived within its borders more and for foreign insurgents less.
I frankly trust the engineers at the time of 8-inch floppy disks more than whoever made the ssd's that's for sure. I think a very simple usb 2.0 stick should have sufficed for an airgapped solution so dumb it can't be hijacked. But there are tiny usb readers, there are no tiny 8 inch floppy readers.....hmmm the size of this disk is a feature. It might even make sense to make it a 16 inch or bigger disk because in this case portability is not a feature.
I'm not sure youve ever had a dozen or more 2.5"s at your desk, I have, they get mixed up and walk off.
Just trying to do my part ITT to prevent my own demise due to cracked nuclear weapons because I am pretty pretty sure the u.s. military at this point reads everything I write here.
You know who you are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @10:15AM
"Would you like to play a game?"
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 19 2019, @07:24AM
I hope this is really by some flash chips developed in USA and manufactured there from the beginning. Because going from floppy to network is more expensive in fact! Why?
To transfer the data on floppy:
1. You encrypt data, compress and put in on floppy, maybe even two for redundancy.
2. You lock the floppies in diplomatic mail shielded briefcase.
3. The briefcase is handcuffed to the known trusted courier
4. Courier transfers the briefcase.
5. The floppy is read and then destroyed.
Cost: Floppy, briefcase, courier.
Meanwhile in the network land:
1. You design and manufacture every piece of network equipment from scratch. Even smallest capacitor from outside may hold a backdoor.
2. You shield every inch of cable with a thick RF shield, preferably with high-performance shielding and this is going into precious metals, at least silver alloys (nickel-iron will not work as its shielding capabilities are present when it's not deformed).
3. Additionally you have to compensate the thermal readout (this is now under research) so you just put the kilowatts of energy into it.
4. Every computer networked is computer breaking the air gap. Period. Supply power to it by generators, not the grid of course.
5. All logic in-house. All components in-house. No Chinese grain of sand in silicon! Ah, and no other agencies backdoors like Intel ME, AMD PSP or DRM in video.
6. All operating systems developed without auditing on source level and not 100% complying with documentation... yes, backdoor.
7. In the happy ad-powered world, where everything not satisfying advertisers is strictly censored and prohibited, companies which make these hardware parts and systems must have these famous 1940s signs like "No gooks allowed".
And don't even try to talk about encryption. In 1997 my friend encrypted his data with then leading tool called ?NDR???... doesn't matter, generally DES, and destroyed the passwords note pad. After analyzing how the password is used to derive key, a whole cracking took 17 days on 2010 hardware.