Dutch Defence Secretary Boldly Claims F-35 Software Could Be 'Jailbroken'(theaviationist.com) |
Dutch Defence Secretary Boldly Claims F-35 Software Could Be 'Jailbroken'(theaviationist.com) |
USA is always bitching about China and yet, it uses its giant techs to spy on the whole world. Microsoft O365 blocking Europen politics email account by Trump demands.
Seeing Europe ditching USA big techs software/SaaS in flavor of open-source, is the best thing that could have happened.
Back to the F-35, anything built before 80s, were built to last. Everything built now is built to break and overly engineered, it is like if the whole world decided to become German engineers and yet have no idea of what they are doing.
Australia F-35 program has been a complete fiasco, the project budget no longer knows what budget means, relaying on USA technology or anything really has been proved to be very costly and you don't really own it, the USA does. Just like China but China cannot do what the USA can for whatever reason.
Google is literally begging EU not to do that, because it is destroying Google's moat.
https://www.techzine.eu/news/infrastructure/138751/google-wa...
Code is only one of many dependencies (designed in, I assume).
There is a country that has a full exception to this. They run their own maintenance facilities, have their own software layer running on top of Lockheed system, their own EW suite, and significant control over the data flows. They negotiated this precisely because they understood the dependency trap. In addition they requested modifications to allow the F-35 to carry nuclear weapons.
The naivety of the Dutch Defense Secretary in thinking all have the sames rules is what would be expected...Guess the country name...
"F-35I Adir: Israel’s Custom F-35 That No Other Nation Has" - https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/04/f-35i-adir-israels-custo...
And the ultimate kicker...They got them for free, plus 2 Billion from US tax payers...While suckers Norway, Denmark, Italy who invested billions in the program development plus Netherlands etc...Have to pay for them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
- spaghetti code that’s difficult or impossible to formally exercise fully in unit, comprehensive, or proof-centric testing
- delivered as compiled binaries for industrial-chip architectures by e.g. Renesas that have extremely hardened hardware and resilience
- annoying but feasible to reverse engineer in Ghidra
- designed to prioritize repairability over firmware signature enforcement
- has an undocumented but wire-sniffable protocol for firmware updates
So I am of a mind to take their statement at face value, because it’s vanishingly unlikely that the U.S. disallows field patching of a warplane due to lacking a crypto private key, much less bothers to spend money on crypto-attestation style locks. This is USgov military-industrial, not Bay Area marketer tech à la Google; competent security practices in deployed hardware are not likely to be the norm, especially not when every plane includes armed guards free of charge to the contract.
If I were a competent defense partner with the USgov, I would have already commissioned and complete a full decompilation, because duh. That the Dutch are saying this openly is charming but not particularly surprising. Presumably there’s a US backdoor in the IFF module, for instance, and while it’s fine to leave it in place, it’s better than fine to patch a warning alert in so that you know when it’s exercised. This is basic defense programming 101 stuff here, right? .. right?
- Has an undocumented blob execution feature used for testing of the unit after it was sealed and glued.
- Has a documented secondary bootloader (remote code execution by design) due to historical reasons.
espionage, would be the name of that witch.