>In order for the 15 Eurofighters to start, Austria's federal army paid 1.5 million euros over three years to a private US security company. Now, the costs for those two "civilians" stationed at the Zeltweg airbase have been confirmed, who have to allow every start with the current US-"Crypto-Keys" for navigation and friend or foe identification.
The ministry of defense denies that the two Americans from a not named US company are NSA contractors. They claim the jets would fly without the keys but without encrypted navigation and communication. He also mentions the same situation for Sweden and Switzerland.
That article is not entirely accurate and is based on a misunderstanding of what those contractors are doing. They're loading NATO MIDS/Link-16/IFF keys, not 'starting' the aircraft.
The Austrian Eurofighters can fly and operate without those keys, they just won't be able to join NATO Link-16 networks or other encrypted NATO communications or navigation networks. This is standard practice for all modern combat aircraft, incidentally, as encryption keys are rotated on a regular basis and need to be loaded into the aircraft's onboard systems before flight. The data can also include additional interoperability elements such as TDMA slice allocations in the case of Link-16.
The reason it has to be done by the unnamed contractor is because Austria is not a member of NATO, so it can't be given control over key handling. The same is true for Sweden & Switzerland.
It's a logical tradeoff. Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland get access to encrypted NATO networks and can therefore interoperate seamlessly with NATO forces, but they're always free to opt-out. Sweden for instance has fall-backs to national data links and communications networks to which only it has the encryption keys.
It’s not a secret, despite the MIL-STD-6016 doc technically being classified one of my favorite documents on the subject is the Wireshark dissector the Australian government wrote and then published the document of how they’ve achieved it including pretty much the entire protocol: http://willrobertson.id.au/resources/wireshark/DSTO-TN-1257....
In my case, it's the result of a research project I carried out a few years ago. While that went into somewhat deeper detail, the kind of information I've shared here is quite openly available from official and academic sources.
Why would such information be particularly secret? Only secret keys are secret; knowing how to use them is a basic skill for all military pilots and a lot of other aviation personnel.
Generally speaking, most NATO / military standards have some level of classification that prevents dissemination to a random member of the public.
That said, for the non-sensitive stuff, there's usually access out there because someone's posted it or it's been discussed in a presentation.
Reasons you would want such information controlled: if an adversary were to get in a shooting war with NATO, knowing the entire sequence required to launch fully operational aircraft makes interrupting that sequence much easier.
Isn't that the exact reason, as joining NATO would violate said neutrality?
"Austria declared 'its permanent neutrality of its own accord.' The second section of this law stated that 'in all future times Austria will not join any military alliances and will not permit the establishment of any foreign military bases on her territory.'"
Joining an alliance is pretty much the way to not be neutral. They signed a treaty in 1955 to end allied occupation, with the condition that they don't join any alliances. The intent was that this would prevent them from joining with the Soviets. Times have changed, but the treaty has not, so they are not allowed into NATO since it is an alliance. I'm sure if they really wanted to join all the former Alliance signatories (which are now part of NATO) would be willing to renegotiate the treaty and let them in.
Sweden and Switzerland don't fly Eurofighter jets. They are also not members of NATO so I'm not surprised that they can only get NATO IFF codes under restrictions.
I assume these are processed by secure hardware inside the plane, if you could just copy them after being loaded the entire exercise with the contractors would be rather pointless. So I assume after the contractors load the codes into the plane, they are already protected by regulations governing access and sale/export of the plane, which probably amount to roughly "Remember, no russians".
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18642194
>In order for the 15 Eurofighters to start, Austria's federal army paid 1.5 million euros over three years to a private US security company. Now, the costs for those two "civilians" stationed at the Zeltweg airbase have been confirmed, who have to allow every start with the current US-"Crypto-Keys" for navigation and friend or foe identification.
The ministry of defense denies that the two Americans from a not named US company are NSA contractors. They claim the jets would fly without the keys but without encrypted navigation and communication. He also mentions the same situation for Sweden and Switzerland.