waddles for desert wrote:Only "trusted people" should be in a physical position to access ship's systems should, or you have a hell of a problem to begin with.
The greater concern should be making ship's systems accessible to the people that are trying to make them run after taking battle damage. Are you going to lock out the people doing damage control because the guy with the supersecret authentication method is dead? solberg/kzt security should be fine for ship's systems.
One of the hardest problems to solve is physical security: in a very real sense, if a black hat can get his hands on the actual hardware, he can probably breach anything you can do.
waddles for desert wrote:Tacnet's should have JohnRoth like systems to be sure that the commands are coming from a ship legitimately in the net. But, the tac people running the tacnet should only have to go through kzt/solberg security to get their commands out over the net.
I suspect that most military officers would say that if you're in a working military vehicle like a warship, and you're sitting at the tac officer's console, and you pass some rather simple biometrics, you're authorized. It's simply a matter of risk assessment. The environment itself is high security, why should you get in people's way?
waddles for desert wrote:There was a comment, I believe by JohnRoth, that ship in command of the tacnet would not need access to control the sensors of other ships. If I understand correctly, the ship running the tacnet for an AESA equipped Aegis battle group directs and redirects the beams of the other ships in the tacnet. With AESA equipped ships, while there is probably a periodic/cyclic general search by each ship (hopefully), much of each ship's scan is directed by the controlling ship. I am not sure where they are with it, but emissions from two or more ships can at least theorectically be combined to form composite beams.
Hemphill's R&D folks and the spooks who drafted Cardones in With One Stone should be using the kind of security that JohnRoth advocates.
At one point I believe Heinlein had Lazarus Long make a comment to the effect that anyone who put a critical component out to the lowest bidder got what they deserved.