Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios

[Brian Gladman]

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Hansen" <davidh@spidacom.co.uk>
> To: <ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk>
> Sent: 04 September 2000 17:20
> Subject: Re: Army signals security & "Clansmen" series radios
>
> > On 4 Sep 00, at 14:41, Owen Lewis wrote:
> >
> > > Do you suppose that there might be separate 'codes' for national and
> > > international use? If so, why should the French, as a member of NATO,
> > > be denied or otherwise not hold copies of the codes for international
> > > use?
> >
> > The French are usually semi-detached members of NATO, except when it
> > suits them. ISTR they have never taken part in the integrated
> > planning aspects of the organisation.

Owen has commented on this and I agree with him that some aspects of the
relationship between NATO and France are not fully understood by the general
public (hardy surprising).

In fact NATO activities are split into more than just political and
military - the overall activity is subdivided into a number of areas, each
of which is funded by the NATO nations on the basis of agreed shares.  In
the 1980s France was not a party to many of these joint activities and this
meant that France neither funded nor derived benefits from them.

As Owen has said, during this period France maintained a political presence
in NATO and was often seen by other NATO nations as trying to secure a
strong influence in the planning and conduct of NATO activities to which it
was not contributing in financial terms.  Needless to say this was
strenuously resisted by the other NATO nations and in the 1990s there was a
shift in French policy and a resulting willingness to participete and fund
specific NATO efforts.  Again, however, there were serious objections to
what some NATO nations saw as a French attempt to 'dine a la carte' at the
NATO table.

In the mid 1990s French policy shifted further and this allowed France to
fund and join a number of the NATO programmes.   For example, France
rejoined the NATO R&D effort while I was Deputy Director at the NATO SHAPE
Technical Centre in 1995/I996 and sent scientists to work there for the
first time in decades.

In my view it is fair to characterise the French position in NATO in the
1980s as 'semi-detached'.  However I doubt that this would be a sensible
characterisation of the current position.

But returning to crypto, there is very little integration of encrypted
communications in NATO since each NATO nation takes a national approach to
cryptographic information protection (guess why).  The sharing of sensitive
information between NATO nations is fraught with many difficulties and
sensible technical solutions such as 'end to end' encryption are precluded
because the nations will not agree common algorithms or the
agreement/exchange of shared encryption keys.   In practical terms each NATO
nation runs its own national protected domain and gateways are needed to
decrypt/reencrypt any secure information that needs to pass from one such
domain to another. Such gateways are immensely difficult to build (I believe
this is impossible in practice) and the end result is that NATO has no
modern, efficient secure messaging systems although it has been talking
about this for many years.

       Brian