Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios

[Quentin Campbell]

The link with ukcrypto interests/concerns is made at the end of this
message. I do not want to distract the list from the RIP Bill so any
replies to me off-list please. I will summarise for the list later if it
seems appropriate.

I would be grateful if anyone on this list with an interest in military
radio comms could expand on a story that appeared in the "Telegraph"
recently and which was repeated in the August edition of "Radio
Communications". The latter version had a different spin, more of which
below.

It appears that British forces serving with K-FOR have expressed serious
concerns about the lack of reliable and secure radio communications kit.
There is very little detail in the articles but the implication is that
this refers to lower echelon, unit-to-unit, comms rather than HQ to UK
comms.

The stories refer to the "30 years old Clansmen" mobile and man-pack sets 
and imply that these have no in-built voice encryption capability.

The interest to ukcrypto list members lies in the spin that "Rad. Comm."
put on the story. This is that unit signalers have fallen back on using
morse rather than voice in order to improve security.

Now the only reason that I can see for using morse in these circumstances
is that some sort of simple to use field cipher[1] was employed to
encrypt the traffic.

The "Telegraph" saw the story as sufficiently important to give it a
reasonable spread. It is a matter of regret that they didn't follow up on
it. They could have noted, for example, the perverse irony in which this
Government finds itself - it has failed to ensure that its soldiers have a
secure comms capability while at the same time energetically trying to
deprive its citizenry of the use of secure comms.


[1] It is interesting that the Playfair Cipher has been used as a field
    cipher by both British and Australian forces from the Boer War at
    least to the end of WW II. But surely not now!

    Any views on what could be used nowadays as an emergency hand cipher?

 
Quentin
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