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Growing up in New York City, I always wanted to be a spy. But when I graduated from college in January 1968, the Cold War and Vietnam War were raging, and spying seemed like a risky career choice. So I became an electrical engineer, working on real-time spectrum analyzers for a U.S. defense contractor.

In 1976, during a visit to the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, I saw an Enigma, the famous German World War II cipher machine. I was fascinated. Some years later, I had the good fortune of visiting the huge headquarters of the cipher machine company Crypto AG (CAG), in Steinhausen, Switzerland, and befriending a high-level cryptographer there. My friend gave me an internal history of the company written by its founder, Boris Hagelin. It mentioned a 1963 cipher machine, the HX-63.

Like the Enigma, the HX-63 was an electromechanical cipher system known as a rotor machine. It was the only electromechanical rotor machine ever built by CAG, and it was much more advanced and secure than even the famous Enigmas. In fact, it was arguably the most secure rotor machine ever built. I longed to get my hands on one, but I doubted I ever would.

Fast forward to 2010. I'm in a dingy third subbasement at a French military communications base. Accompanied by two-star generals and communications officers, I enter a secured room filled with ancient military radios and cipher machines. Voil! I am amazed to see a Crypto AG HX-63, unrecognized for decades and consigned to a dusty, dimly lit shelf.

I carefully extract the 16-kilogram (35-pound) machine. There's a hand crank on the right side, enabling the machine to operate away from mains power. As I cautiously turn it, while typing on the mechanical keyboard, the nine rotors advance, and embossed printing wheels feebly strike a paper tape. I decided on the spot to do everything in my power to find an HX-63 that I could restore to working order.

If you've never heard of the HX-63 until just now, don't feel bad. Most professional cryptographers have never heard of it. Yet it was so secure that its invention alarmed William Friedman, one of the greatest cryptanalysts ever and, in the early 1950s, the first chief cryptologist of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). After reading a 1957 Hagelin patent (more on that later), Friedman realized that the HX-63, then under development, was, if anything, more secure than the NSA's own KL-7, then considered unbreakable. During the Cold War, the NSA built thousands of KL-7s, which were used by every U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence agency from 1952 to 1968.

The reasons for Friedman's anxiety are easy enough to understand. The HX-63 had about 10600 possible key combinations; in modern terms, that's equivalent to a 2,000-bit binary key. For comparison, the Advanced Encryption Standard, which is used today to protect sensitive information in government, banking, and many other sectors, typically uses a 128- or a 256-bit key.

In the center of the cast-aluminum base of the HX-63 cipher machine is a precision Swiss-made direct-current gear motor. Also visible is the power supply [lower right] and the function switch [left], which is used to select the operating modefor example, encryption or decryption.Peter Adams

A total of 12 different rotors are available for the HX-63, of which nine are used at any one time. Current flows into one of 41 gold-plated contacts on the smaller-diameter side of the rotor, through a conductor inside the rotor, out through a gold-plated contact on the other side, and then into the next rotor. The incrementing of each rotor is programmed by setting pins, which are just visible in the horizontal rotor.Peter Adams

Just as worrisome was that CAG was a privately owned Swiss company, selling to any government, business, or individual. At the NSA, Friedman's job was to ensure that the U.S. government had access to the sensitive, encrypted communications of all governments and threats worldwide. But traffic encrypted by the HX-63 would be unbreakable.

Friedman and Hagelin were good friends. During World War II, Friedman had helped make Hagelin a very wealthy man by suggesting changes to one of Hagelin's cipher machines, which paved the way for the U.S. Army to license Hagelin's patents. The resulting machine, the M-209-B, became a workhorse during the war, with some 140,000 units fielded. During the 1950s, Friedman and Hagelin's close relationship led to a series of understandings collectively known as a gentleman's agreement" between U.S. intelligence and the Swiss company. Hagelin agreed not to sell his most secure machines to countries specified by U.S. intelligence, which also got secret access to Crypto's machines, plans, sales records, and other data.

But in 1963, CAG started to market the HX-63, and Friedman became even more alarmed. He convinced Hagelin not to manufacture the new device, even though the machine had taken more than a decade to design and only about 15 had been built, most of them for the French army. However, 1963 was an interesting year in cryptography. Machine encryption was approaching a crossroads; it was starting to become clear that the future belonged to electronic encipherment. Even a great rotor machine like the HX-63 would soon be obsolete.

That was a challenge for CAG, which had never built an electronic cipher machine. Perhaps partly because of this, in 1966, the relationship among CAG, the NSA, and the CIA went to the next level. That year, the NSA delivered to its Swiss partner an electronic enciphering system that became the basis of a CAG machine called the H-460. Introduced in 1970, the machine was a failure. However, there were bigger changes afoot at CAG: That same year, the CIA and the German Federal Intelligence Service secretly acquired CAG for US $5.75 million. (Also in 1970, Hagelin's son Bo, who was the company's sales manager for the Americas and who had opposed the transaction, died in a car crash near Washington, D.C.)

Although the H-460 was a failure, it was succeeded by a machine called the H-4605, of which thousands were sold. The H-4605 was designed with NSA assistance. To generate random numbers, it used multiple shift registers based on the then-emerging technology of CMOS electronics. These numbers were not true random numbers, which never repeat, but rather pseudorandom numbers, which are generated by a mathematical algorithm from an initial seed."

This mathematical algorithm was created by the NSA, which could therefore decrypt any messages enciphered by the machine. In common parlance, the machines were backdoored." This was the start of a new era for CAG. From then on, its electronic machines, such as the HC-500 series, were secretly designed by the NSA, sometimes with the help of corporate partners such as Motorola. This U.S.-Swiss operation was code-named Rubicon. The backdooring of all CAG machines continued until 2018, when the company was liquidated.

Parts of this story emerged in leaks by CAG employees before 2018 and, especially, in a subsequent investigation by the Washington Post and a pair of European broadcasters, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, in Germany, and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, in Switzerland. The Post's article, published on 11 February 2020, touched off firestorms in the fields of cryptology, information security, and intelligence.

The revelations badly damaged the Swiss reputation for discretion and dependability. They triggered civil and criminal litigation and an investigation by the Swiss government and, just this past May, led to the resignation of the Swiss intelligence chief Jean-Philippe Gaudin, who had fallen out with the defense minister over how the revelations had been handled. In fact, there's an interesting parallel to our modern era, in which backdoors are increasingly common and the FBI and other U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies sporadically tussle with smartphone manufacturers over access to encrypted data on the phones.

Even before these revelations, I was deeply fascinated by the HX-63, the last of the great rotor machines. So I could scarcely believe my good fortune in 2020 when, after years of negotiations, I took possession of an HX-63 for my research for the Association des Rservistes du Chiffre et de la Scurit de l'Information, a Paris-based professional organization of cryptographers and information-security specialists. This particular unit, different from the one I had seen a decade before, had been untouched since 1963. I immediately began to plan the restoration of this historically resonant machine.

People have been using codes and ciphers to protect sensitive information for a couple of thousand years. The first ciphers were based on hand calculations and tables. In 1467, a mechanical device that became known as the Alberti cipher wheel was introduced. Then, just after World War I, an enormous breakthrough occurred, one of the greatest in cryptographic history: Edward Hebern in the United States, Hugo Koch in the Netherlands, and Arthur Scherbius in Germany, within months of one another, patented electromechanical machines that used rotors to encipher messages. Thus began the era of the rotor machine. Scherbius's machine became the basis for the famous Enigma used by the German military from the 1930s until the end of WW II.

To understand how a rotor machine works, first recall the basic goal of cryptography: substituting each of the letters in a message, called plaintext, with other letters in order to produce an unreadable message, called ciphertext. It's not enough to make the same substitution every timereplacing every F with a Q, for example, and every K with an H. Such a monoalphabetic cipher would be easily solved.

A rotor machine gets around that problem usingyou guessed itrotors. Start with a round disk that's roughly the diameter of a hockey puck, but thinner. On both sides of the disk, spaced evenly around the edge, are 26 metal contacts, each corresponding to a letter of the English alphabet. Inside the disk are wires connecting a contact on one side of the disk to a different one on the other side. The disk is connected electrically to a typewriter-like keyboard. When a user hits a key on the keyboard, say W, electric current flows to the W position on one side of the rotor. The current goes through a wire in the rotor and comes out at another position, say L. However, after that keystroke, the rotor rotates one or more positions. So the next time the user hits the W key, the letter will be encrypted not as L but rather as some other letter.

Though more challenging than simple substitution, such a basic, one-rotor machine would be child's play for a trained cryptanalyst to solve. So rotor machines used multiple rotors. Versions of the Enigma, for example, had either three rotors or four. In operation, each rotor moved at varying intervals with respect to the others: A keystroke could move one rotor or two, or all of them. Operators further complicated the encryption scheme by choosing from an assortment of rotors, each wired differently, to insert in their machine. Military Enigma machines also had a plugboard, which swapped specific pairs of letters both at the keyboard input and at the output lamps.

The rotor-machine era finally ended around 1970, with the advent of electronic and software encryption, although a Soviet rotor machine called Fialka was deployed well into the 1980s.

The HX-63 pushed the envelope of cryptography. For starters it has a bank of nine removable rotors. There's also a modificator," an array of 41 rotary switches, each with 41 positions, that, like the plugboard on the Enigma, add another layer, an unchanging scramble, to the encryption. The unit I acquired has a cast-aluminum base, a power supply, a motor drive, a mechanical keyboard, and a paper-tape printer designed to display both the input text and either the enciphered or deciphered text. A function-control switch on the base switches among four modes: off, clear" (test), encryption, and decryption.

In encryption mode, the operator types in the plaintext, and the encrypted message is printed out on the paper tape. Each plaintext letter typed into the keyboard is scrambled according to the many permutations of the rotor bank and modificator to yield the ciphertext letter. In decryption mode, the process is reversed. The user types in the encrypted message, and both the original and decrypted message are printed, character by character and side by side, on the paper tape.

While encrypting or decrypting a message, the HX-63 prints both the original and the encrypted message on paper tape. The blue wheels are made of an absorbent foam that soaks up ink and applies it to the embossed print wheels.Peter Adams

Beneath the nine rotors on the HX-63 are nine keys that unlock each rotor to set the initial rotor position before starting a message. That initial position is an important component of the cryptographic key.Peter Adams

To begin encrypting a message, you select nine rotors (out of 12) and set up the rotor pins that determine the stepping motion of the rotors relative to one another. Then you place the rotors in the machine in a specific order from right to left, and set each rotor in a specific starting position. Finally, you set each of the 41 modificator switches to a previously determined position. To decrypt the message, those same rotors and settings, along with those of the modificator, must be re-created in the receiver's identical machine. All of these positions, wirings, and settings of the rotors and of the modificator are collectively known as the key.

The HX-63 includes, in addition to the hand crank, a nickel-cadmium battery to run the rotor circuit and printer if no mains power is available. A 12-volt DC linear power supply runs the motor and printer and charges the battery. The precision 12-volt motor runs continuously, driving the rotors and the printer shaft through a reduction gear and a clutch. Pressing a key on the keyboard releases a mechanical stop, so the gear drive propels the machine through a single cycle, turning the shaft, which advances the rotors and prints a character.

The printer has two embossed alphabet wheels, which rotate on each keystroke and are stopped at the desired letter by four solenoids and ratchet mechanisms. Fed by output from the rotor bank and keyboard, mechanical shaft encoders sense the position of the alphabet printing wheels and stop the rotation at the required letter. Each alphabet wheel has its own encoder. One set prints the input on the left half of the paper tape; the other prints the output on the right side of the tape. After an alphabet wheel is stopped, a cam releases a print hammer, which strikes the paper tape against the embossed letter. At the last step the motor advances the paper tape, completing the cycle, and the machine is ready for the next letter.

As I began restoring the HX-63, I quickly realized the scope of the challenge. The plastic gears and rubber parts had deteriorated, to the point where the mechanical stress of motor-driven operation could easily destroy them. Replacement parts don't exist, so I had to build such parts myself.

After cleaning and lubricating the machine, I struck a few keys on the keyboard. I was delighted to see that all nine cipher rotors turned and the machine printed a few characters on the paper tape. But the printout was intermittently blank and distorted. I replaced the corroded nickel-cadmium battery and rewired the power transformer, then gradually applied AC power. To my amazement, the motor, rotors, and the printer worked for a few keystrokes. But suddenly there was a crash of gnashing gears, and broken plastic bits flew out of the machine. Printing stopped altogether, and my heartbeat nearly did too.

I decided to disassemble the HX-63 into modules: The rotor bank lifted off, then the printer. The base contains the keyboard, power supply, and controls. Deep inside the printer were four plastic snubbers," which cushion and position the levers that stop the ratchet wheels at the indicated letter. These snubbers had disintegrated. Also, the foam disks that ink the alphabet wheels were decomposing, and gooey bits were clogging the alphabet wheels.

I made some happy, serendipitous finds. To rebuild the broken printer parts, I needed a dense rubber tube. I discovered that a widely available neoprene vacuum hose worked perfectly. Using a drill press and a steel rod as a mandrel, I cut the hose into precise, 10-millimeter sections. But the space deep within the printer, where the plastic snubbers are supposed to be, was blocked by many shafts and levers, which seemed too risky to remove and replace. So I used right-angle long-nosed pliers and dental tools to maneuver the new snubbers under the mechanism. After hours of deft surgery, I managed to install the snubbers.

The ink wheels were made of an unusual porous foam. I tested many replacement materials, settling finally on a dense blue foam cylinder. Alas, it had a smooth, closed-cell surface that would not absorb ink, so I abraded the surface with rough sandpaper.

After a few more such fixes, I faced just one more snafu: a bad paper-tape jam. I had loaded a new roll of paper tape, but I did not realize that this roll had a slightly smaller core. The tape seized, tore, and jammed under the alphabet wheels, deeply buried and inaccessible. I was stymiedbut then made a wonderful discovery. The HX-63 came with thin stainless-steel strips with serrated edges designed specifically to extract jammed paper tape. I finally cleared the jam, and the restoration was complete.

One of the reasons why the HX-63 was so fiendishly secure was a technique called reinjection, which increased its security exponentially. Rotors typically have a position for each letter of the alphabet they're designed to encrypt. So a typical rotor for English would have 26 positions. But the HX-63's rotors have 41 positions. That's because reinjection (also called reentry) uses extra circuit paths beyond those for the letters of the alphabet. In the HX-63, there are 15 additional paths.

Here's how reinjection worked in the HX-63. In encryption mode, current travels in one direction through all the rotors, each introducing a unique permutation. After exiting the last rotor, the current loops back through that same rotor to travel back through all the rotors in the opposite direction. However, as the current travels back through the rotors, it follows a different route, through the 15 additional circuit paths set aside for this purpose. The exact path depends not only on the wiring of the rotors but also on the positions of the 41 modificators. So the total number of possible circuit configurations is 26! x 15!, which equals about 5.2 x 1038. And each of the nine rotors' internal connections can be rewired in 26! different ways. In addition, the incrementing of the rotors is controlled by a series of 41 mechanical pins. Put it all together and the total number of different key combinations is around 10600.

Such a complex cipher was not only unbreakable in the 1960s, it would be extremely difficult to crack even today. Reinjection was first used on the NSA's KL-7 rotor machine. The technique was invented during WW II by Albert W. Small, at the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service. It was the subject of a secret patent that Small filed in 1944 and that was finally granted in 1961 (No. 2,984,700).

Meanwhile, in 1953, Hagelin applied for a U.S. patent for the technique, which he intended to use in what became the HX-63. Perhaps surprisingly, given that the technique was already the subject of a patent application by Small, Hagelin was granted his patent in 1957 (No. 2,802,047). Friedman, for his part, had been alarmed all along by Hagelin's use of reinjection, because the technique had been used in a whole series of vitally important U.S. cipher machines, and because it was a great threat to the NSA's ability to listen to government and military message traffic at will.

The series of meetings between Friedman and Hagelin that resulted in the cancellation of the HX-63 was mentioned in a 1977 biography of Friedman, The Man Who Broke Purple, by Ronald Clark, and it was further detailed in 2014 through a disclosure by the NSA's William F. Friedman Collection.

After a career as an electrical engineer and inventor, author Jon D. Paul now researches, writes, and lectures on the history of digital technology, especially encryption. In the 1970s he began collecting vintage electronic instruments, such as the Tektronix oscilloscopes and Hewlett-Packard spectrum analyzers seen here. Peter Adams

The revelation of Crypto AG's secret deals with U.S. intelligence may have caused a bitter scandal, but viewed from another angle, Rubicon was also one of the most successful espionage operations in historyand a forerunner of modern backdoors. Nowadays, it's not just intelligence agencies that are exploiting backdoors and eavesdropping on secure" messages and transactions. Windows 10's telemetry" function continuously monitors a user's activity and data. Nor are Apple Macs safe. Malware that allowed attackers to take control of a Mac has circulated from time to time; a notable example was Backdoor.MAC.Eleanor, around 2016. And in late 2020, the cybersecurity company FireEye disclosed that malware had opened up a backdoor in the SolarWinds Orion platform, used in supply-chain and government servers. The malware, called SUNBURST, was the first of a series of malware attacks on Orion. The full extent of the damage is still unknown.

The HX-63 machine I restored now works about as well as it did in 1963. I have yet to tire of the teletype-like motor sound and the clack-clack of the keyboard. Although I never realized my adolescent dream of being a secret agent, I am delighted by this little glimmer of that long-ago, glamorous world.

And there's even a postscript. I recently discovered that my contact at Crypto AG, whom I'll call C," was also a security officer at the Swiss intelligence agencies. And so for decades, while working at the top levels of Crypto AG, C" was a back channel to the CIA and Swiss intelligence agencies, and even had a CIA code name. My wry old Swiss friend had known everything all along!

This article appears in the September 2021 print issue as The Last Rotor Machine."

The Crypto AG affair was described in a pair of Swedish books. One of them was Borisprojektet : rhundradets strsta spionkupp : NSA och ett svensk snille lurade en hel vrld [translation: The Boris Project: The Biggest Spy Coup of the Century: NSA and a Swedish genius cheated an entire world], 2016, Sixten Svensson, Vaktelfrlag, ISBN 978-91-982180-8-4.

Also, in 2020, Swiss editor and author Res Strehle published Verschlsselt: Der Fall Hans Bhler [translation: Encrypted: The Hans Bhler Case], and later Operation Crypto. Die Schweiz im Dienst von CIA und BND [Operation Crypto: Switzerland in the Service of the CIA and BND].

Read the original post:
The Scandalous History of the Last Rotor Cipher Machine - IEEE Spectrum

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When the National Security Agency recently awarded Amazon a multi-billion-dollar cloud computing contract, you can guess what happened. Once again, as in the Defense Departments JEDI program, the deal is tied up in protest, only this time Microsoft is the protester. DoD eventually scrapped the whole program. With how the NSA award is likely to play out, Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to a partner at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, Hamish Hume.

Tom Temin: Mr. Hume, good to have you on.

Hamish Hume: Great to be on Tom.

Tom Temin: Glad to have you in studio with us. And first of all, give us the status of this current NSA award. When did it happen and where does it stand right now?

Hamish Hume: So the NSA award to Amazon was made just about two weeks ago or a bit more in early August and was immediately challenged by Microsoft in front of the GAO. Its not yet in court and therefore its not yet public. We cant see Microsofts challenge. But its sitting there at the GAO and the GAO has said it expects to issue a decision by October 29.

Tom Temin: And this is a weird one, because it looks like son of JEDI or daughter of JEDI or child of JEDI, I guess, to be politically correct. Nowadays, multi-billion, multi-year single award. What do you think the NSA was thinking?

Hamish Hume: Well, its hard to tell, and it is very curious. It is said to be a $10 billion award, which is the same number they used for JEDI. And even though the NSA is under the Department of Defense, it is not 100% clear whether the NSA was part of the original JEDI contract, but one would assume that it was. And the very same month that Amazon obtained an injunction against the award to Microsoft of the JEDI contract in February 2020, is when the NSA announced that it was going to be issuing a solicitation for this new contract. So its complicated, and Im happy to run through that chronology, but it does appear tied together but in ways that are not 100%. transparent.

Tom Temin: This is no way possibly a DoD insurance policy for JEDI.

Hamish Hume: You never know. I mean, JEDI has now the one other important update is a month before this award was made to Amazon in July of this year, a couple of months ago, DOJ announced that it was scrapping and canceling the JEDI contract, and Amazon obviously welcomed that news. It had been challenging it. Microsoft, I would say put out a notice saying they accepted it and understood it. But they obviously were not happy about it. So JEDI has been scrapped and an NSA award has been made the very next month, and that award is now being challenged.

Tom Temin: Alright, there were a lot of grounds for the challenge. It was complicated in the JEDI case, because of officials that had worked in DoD that allegedly had a conflict of interest. And without relitigating that whole case, in your experience, and you have done a lot of protest litigation over the decades, how will this likely play out do you think?

Hamish Hume: Well, bid protest litigation is very hard to win. Theres a fairly high percentage when youre at the GAO of the agency taking some corrective action to sort of dot the Is and cross the Ts to do everything perfectly and get it all correct. But to really overturn an award particularly or an award of this magnitude is very, very difficult to do. We were fortunate to be able to do one for a company called Palantir against the US Army. But in general, its extremely difficult to do. I do think its worth going back to understand the nature of the awards the first time around because despite what I just said, Amazon was able to get an injunction to the first JEDI award on fairly narrow grounds, despite having sweeping claims and its complained about President Trumps improper influence. They ended up getting that injunction on quite a narrow technical basis. But it proved to be what appears to have been a game changer

Tom Temin: Because in a lot of the public statements, Microsoft and Amazon traded barbs about who was more technically qualified. I mean, the reality is this probably Tweedledee, Tweedledum, when it comes to technology prowess between a company like Microsoft, a company like Amazon, so it could be maybe in the details of the percentage of pennies per transaction that happens in the cloud, which could add up to millions over the years. I dont know. We really cant tell at this point, though, can we?

Hamish Hume: We cannot tell. And Im not an expert on cloud technology. as such. However, its worth noting that despite what you say and what one would think about they must have similar technology. The injunction that Amazon one was based on a very technical point buried within the solicitation and the bid documents, that one of the requirements under just one of numerous scenarios in the original jet award was for the cloud storage system to be quote, highly accessible, which seems obvious, but they they had an offer or they had to ask for a specific definition of what is highly accessible mean. And the DoD says, well it means you have to have either online storage or replicated storage. And the whole lawsuit, the injunction boiled down to the definition of online storage, which meant it had to be available immediately without any human effort or input. And the judge held that Amazon prevailed on the injunction because the judge held that Microsofts bid did not satisfy that requirement. When you read the opinion, it talks about how Microsofts bid documents, instead of talking about online storage, talked about some other kinds of storage, the adjective, which is redacted, which is a great illustration of how even once these cases go to court and get decided, its very hard to tell sometimes what exactly they turned on. But right now, we really dont know what Microsofts arguments are. Theyre better off if they have a clean legal argument, because the standard is highly deferential on anything factual.

Tom Temin: Were speaking with protest attorney Hamish Hume, hes a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner. And there seems to be a bigger issue at work here. And that is over the years, the government has tried to get itself to set requirements, as opposed to technical specifications for everything it buys. This goes back to when Al Gore was vice president and the word three pages of specifications for ashtrays, that was the example that used back then. And so could it be that the government is trying to say we want a highly available cloud thats really secure, and the reference standards for that, of course, and then the bidders are coming in with technical expressions of that requirement, and then fighting over the technical specifications, when really the government was trying to get a large requirement done.

Hamish Hume: Yes, I think what youre talking about now is is a problem near and dear to my heart. From my old case, I think I think some of that is probably whats going on. Theres even debate amongst the different industry players of exactly what a cloud facility means. It can mean different things to different people. It can mean infrastructure as a service platform as a service, it can sometimes even mean software as a service. Theres a National Institute of Standards and Technology definition of the cloud that people have to adhere to. But in general, the government would always like things done differently for it. And the law requires it to the maximum extent possible to buy what the commercial market makes available. And that was the legal ground on which we won the Palantir case. I dont know that thats going to be an issue in this case, because I think they are buying fixed price as a commercial item. But then they want it modified. Particularly DoD is always going to want things modified for its particular needs. And that may well end up being part of what is at issue in the current case, but we really dont know.

Tom Temin: So one more piece of speculation, it could be over security, for example.

Hamish Hume: Absolutely. And in fact, that was one of the issues that Oracle also challenged, the JEDI contract. They didnt challenge the award, they challenged the original solicitation. And one of the things they challenged was there, there was a gating threshold requirement for any bidder had to have I forget was section 1.2, or something had to have at least two or three different physical locations with servers at least 150 miles apart. And that was obviously for national security reasons, although Oracle argued was unnecessary and shouldnt have been at least a gating issue. So I would expect that national security issues and the security of the cloud will be central to any discussion of this. And the government will get enormous amounts of deference in court from that, which is why the only way to win one of these cases is to have a really clear legal defect or a very, very clear, factual defect that a judge will feel comfortable designing it on, because anything general or vague, theyre going to defer to the government.

Tom Temin: And of course, a leading DC law firm doesnt go in with hunches when it goes into court, but based on your experience, and what little we do know of this, is your gut telling you that the NSA will prevail this time around?

Hamish Hume: I think if youre a betting person, you would in these cases always bet on the government. And I think the NSA, it will have been a narrower contract than JEDI, I think they will have had the benefit of the JEDI litigation to look at. And that absent some really clear legal defect of some kind, I would expect they probably will prevail. And then the interesting question is, what is the rest of DoD going to do? Is there going to be a different kind of JEDI? Theres a talk in the press of the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability that JWCC, instead of JEDI, they basically tried to spin the cancellation of JEDI as just technology making the original requirements obsolete to go to your earlier point. And theyre going to come out with new requirements that need to be met, and that it wasnt because of the litigation. And maybe thats completely accurate. I dont know. But Im sure the litigation contributed, at least to some degree. And so what remains to be seen whether theyre going to do it as a single request for the rest of the DoD, or different sub agencies within DoD will have different requests. And the other huge question is are they going to want a sole supplier, a sole vendor, which was what Oracle was complaining about with JEDI that it was it was crafted for only one winner or sometimes what theyll do is theyll have a group of winners to win the original contract and then they have subsequent task orders for specific tasks. And theyre actually supposed to favor that latter approach whenever possible.

Tom Temin: Protest attorney Hamish Hume is a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner. Thanks so much for joining me.

Hamish Hume: Absolutely, Tom. Thanks for having me.

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Microsoft and Amazon are at it again over a cloud computing contract - Federal News Network

Tom Nurre| Angelo State University

The National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity, as part of the National Security Agency, has awarded a grant in the amount of $1.67 million to the Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security at The University of Texas at San Antonioto help communities become more cyber secure nationwide.

The CIAS will work with multiple communities during the two-year grant, beginning with Angelo State University and the City of San Angelo, to help develop a community-wide K-12 cybersecurity program, support local industry and government to be more cyber resilient, and help local academic institutions to develop cybersecurity programs for students by helping create Centers of Academic Excellence.

The UTSA team was awarded the grant following a competitive selection process available only to universities identified as Centers of Academic Excellence. UTSA is the only Hispanic Serving Institution to hold three National Center of Excellence designations from the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security.

The CIAS is collaborating with ASU to develop a program that will be transferable and applicable to communities of any size.

"Communities nationwide are becoming increasingly targeted by cyber threats - both domestic and foreign - which is why a whole-community approach needs to be taken by communities to protect their citizens, organizations and infrastructures from cyberattacks," said Dr. Greg White, director of the CIAS. "This NSA grant will enable the CIAS to work with Angelo State University to implement a cybersecurity program that starts with K-12 education and continues on into local businesses, government and the general public."

The CIAS at UTSA has helped State, Local, Tribal and Territorial (SLTT) entities establish cybersecurity programs since 2002. Cybersecurity exercises, training efforts and assessments for states and communities have also been conducted for nearly 20 years, but this will be the first effort to integrate an entire cybersecurity program within a whole community.

"We're excited about the opportunity to bring our experience and resources into the city of San Angelo," said Dr. White. "This program will develop sustainable initiatives that will help the whole community become cybersecurity savvy."

"I have served with Dr. White when we were both lieutenants stationed at Offutt AFB, Neb., and majors at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.," said ASU President Ronnie Hawkins Jr. "I have nothing but the utmost confidence and respect for his vision and wisdom when it comes to cybersecurity. It is an honor to serve with him again; especially in this capacity by ASU contributing to and supporting the students throughout San Angelo by piloting this unique program."

The two-year pilot program will, in part, establish a K-12 cybersecurity initiative for elementary, middle and high schools that will provide cybersecurity lesson plans, tools and resources to students, teachers and counselors during the school year. It will also expand cybersecurity summer camps and encourage the establishment of CyberPatriot teams and Cyber Threat Defender tournaments.

Additionally, this grant will help establish a Culture of Cybersecurity program that targets K-5 students and a collegiate initiative that will provide an outreach program to area high schools, establish National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition teams, develop certification training and assist 2- and 4-year institutions to meet the requirements for a NSA/DHS Center of Academic of Excellence designation.

Other focus areas will target the establishment of local cybersecurity associations, establishing a continuing education initiative to assist individuals in receiving certifications, a training initiative for non-profit organizations, analysis of current needs for cybersecurity professionals within the community, a community Cybersecurity Day and a whole-community cybersecurity program using the Community Cyber Security Maturity Model to include the establishment of a community Information Sharing and Analysis Organization.

"When this grant ends, the city of San Angelo will be the model for other communities across the state and the nation," said Dr. White. "We look forward to expanding this program to other states during the second year of the pilot."

"This is a first-of-its-kind pilot and will be a 'game changer' for the students and citizens here in San Angelo," President Hawkins said. "We have already spoken to Mayor Brenda Gunter, Dr. Carl Dethloff, superintendent of the San Angelo Independent School District, and Col. Andres Nazario, commander at Goodfellow Air Force Base, about pushing this pilot throughout the city, as well as Tom Green County. This pilot also helps us in our efforts to be recognized as a Center of Academic Excellence by the NSA."

Original post:
Angelo State University to serve as first school in national cybersecurity program - Standard-Times

WASHINGTON: The United States and Pakistan have a shared interest in working together in Afghanistan, National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf said in a phone interview with The Washington Post on Thursday. But the NSA pointed out that cooperation would require fixing the bilateral relationship by moving past problems.

Afghan instability could lead to more terrorism, refugees and economic hardship for Pakistan, Moeed Yusuf said while speaking with Josh Rogin, who worked the interview into an opinion piece which appeared in the newspaper under the headline, Pakistan wants to be treated like an ally, not a scapegoat.

Columnist Rogin said it was unfortunate that instead of addressing Pakistans reservations, the country was being indicted by American media for its alleged support to Taliban over the years. He suggested Washington to seriously consider Pakistans offer of cooperation.

Right now, in the situation we are in, how are US and Pakistans interests not aligned, Moeed Yusuf said in reply to a question.

Im not asking for any sympathy for Pakistan, the NSA said. Im thinking in terms of pure US selfish national interests. How does it help to push away a country of this size, stature and power, he wondered.

Josh Rogin noted that Pakistan stands perennially accused of providing safe haven for the Taliban, but on the other hand officials in Islamabad point out that Pakistan had lost soldiers, as well as thousands of non-combatants, at the hands of extremists since 9/11.

Pakistan is the victim. We had nothing to do with 9/11. We teamed up with the US to fight back and after that there was a major backlash on Pakistan, Moeed Yusuf recalled.

But let all that pass. We need to work out how to move forward as partners because neither side can do without the other in terms of stability in the region.

The US-supported government of president Ashraf Ghani in Kabul, he added, used Pakistan as a scapegoat for its own ineptitude, corruption and unpopularity.

Pakistan helped bring the Taliban to the negotiating table at Washingtons request, got blocked out of the negotiations and was now being blamed for the outcome, the NSA pointed out. Did Pakistan tell the Afghan National Army not to fight? Did Pakistan tell Ashraf Ghani to run away?

Moeed Yusuf said it was obvious the western media had been misreporting the situation in Afghanistan for a long time. Otherwise, he observed, the collapse of the entire state structure within a week was mystifying.

So somebody was lying, somebody was misreporting, or somebody was mistaken about the reality when it came to informing the taxpayers of the Western world.

Recalling a government statement of last week about the Taliban takeover of Kabul, the Washington Post columnist said it becomes apparent there is actually significant overlap with the Biden administrations policy goals.

Pakistan, he wrote, is calling upon the Taliban to work with other ethnic groups for a political settlement that would lead to the formation of an inclusive government in Kabul. Pakistan has urged the Taliban to respect international law and human rights, Josh Rogin said. Islamabad agrees with President Joe Biden that withdrawing all US troops is the right decision.

Pakistan wants the United States to find a way to engage diplomatically with the Taliban, Rogin said, referring to the Pakistani statement. On his part, Moeed Yusuf said Washington should not isolate Afghanistan to punish its new rulers.

Now that the Taliban have the whole country, they dont really need Islamabad as much anymore, he said. Assistance and recognition are the leverage. Who has that? The Western countries have much more leverage in Afghanistan than Pakistan has.

Moeed Yusuf emphasised that the international community must support Afghanistan to avoid a humanitarian crisis in the region.

In an interview to BBC Radio on the situation in Afghanistan, the NSA said Pakistan had so far helped evacuate more than 7,000 people from Kabul and was issuing visas on arrival to those coming through the land route.

Dr Moeed underlined that it was wrong to blame Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan as it was itself badly affected by the turmoil.

The NSA said if the international community left Afghanistan to fend for itself, a catastrophe is impending.

Published in Dawn, August 27th, 2021

More here:
Pakistan, US should move on and work together in Afghanistan: NSA - DAWN.com

Pakistan's National Security Advisor, Moeed Yusuf interacted virtually on Thursday (August 26) with a wide spectrum of British leadership as he opened up on the ongoing Taliban crisis, stating Afghanistan is at risk of a "security vacuum" without an international push for an "inclusive government".

Yusuf also said that the West has "embarrassed" itself by refusing to listen to Pakistan over its take on Afghanistan's ousted government led by Ashraf Ghani. He added thatthe West should help Afghans by engaging with the Taliban to ensure a "governance model".

In a speech to the Conservative thinktank Policy Exchange and as reported by The Guardian, Yusuf called for an internationally coordinated effort to establish the Taliban government. He mentioned that there's a need to have "an inclusive government, rights protected, a moderate governance model".

ALSO READ | Pakistan is second home to the Taliban, says spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid

Yusuf dismissed the claims that Islamabad had allowed a porous border to give Taliban access in Pakistan, hiding from US forces.

However, this comes immediately after the controversial statement made by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid who claimed that Pakistan is like the "second home" of the organisation and that activities that are not in line with the interests of neighbouring countries are not allowed on the territory of Afghanistan.

'Mistakes of the 90s'

Pakistan NSA warned that if the world repeats the "mistakes of the 90s", the results will not be better than last time. He said, "If we again find the easy path and say 'we are done and out of here,' the international legitimacy of the western world will disappear in one second."

"We will have a humanitarian crisis, we will have instability and we will have a security vacuum that terrorists may fill, again targeting Pakistan first and the western world second," he said.

He also accused the West of turning Pakistan into a "scapegoat" and said that the "world should stand up" now and say we will learn lessons, something has gone wrong.

ALSO READ | 'Biden has blood on his hands': Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers slam US president after Kabul blasts

"When the real problems on the ground a lack of trust, corruption, an army not able to stand up were completely ignored," said Pakistan's NSA.

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Pakistan`s NSA wants the West to `engage` with Taliban for `inclusive government` - WION