The use of encrypted digital communications continues to proliferate among your adversaries, including nation states, terrorist groups and organised crime. This creates an urgency for members of the Defence Community — especially the C5ISR, Electronic Warfare and Cyber Operations disciplines — to adapt to these changing realities. Eventually, you might see encryption not just hindering your work, but even threatening your success, or, as NSA Director Admiral Rogers put it in 2016: “Does encryption make it much more difficult for us to execute our mission? Yes.”
To address this issue, SciEngines provides the purpose-designed RIVYERA high-performance computers to services in many countries. This flexible platform is exceedingly scalable, delivering value by its performance, form factors and operational characteristics. It supports your mission by helping you to gain information superiority.
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
Table 1: Areal weight comparison of glass and ceramic – glass composite armour windows (available on the market)
The proliferation of digital devices, also among the military, drives the growth in corresponding protocols used. Just consider what changes the Internet of Things (IoT) alone will bring about on the digital — and consequently the real — battlefield, with more and more assets, including troops and materiel, inter-connected to achieve the desired network effect.
As with Internet traffic, recent years have already seen a tremendous surge in the volume of many types of electronic communications. This is expected to continue for the foreseeable future and is set to also directly affect C5ISR and Electronic Warfare, due to the growing convergence of IP-based and other means of electronic communication. Eventually, non-digital traffic will be relegated to legacy systems only.
Rising data volumes come at a time of heightened awareness for securing content, with more and more of it being encrypted — also by your opponents. As this trend continues, encryption can be expected to become the norm in just a few years’ time, substantially compounding the effect of growing volume.
This directly affects you in your role, be it in operating a C5ISR, EW or Cyber Warfare platform, or in making sure your troops can execute their mission in the most impactful manner. Operators from these three and other disciplines increasingly struggle to derive insight from data in a timely fashion. Not reacting to these dynamics could hinder your ability to accomplish the mission.
HOW CAN WE HELP YOU?
SciEngines manufactures the RIVYERA cryptanalytic platform, comprising of special-purpose computers and a software suite. It allows you to run attacks on cryptographic schemes used for securing data in transit (as used in radio, satellite or wired communication) and data at rest (e.g., encrypted files or hard drives).
You can use the systems in a variety of applications domains, such as C5ISR, Internet Investigations, Cyber Operations, or Battlefield Forensics. In these settings, RIVYERA systems enable your operators to act more swiftly upon newly-collected intelligence.
RIVYERA systems come in data centre and mobile configurations. They have been architected to enable new ways of combating the adversary and provide you with a strategic advantage. Due to its energy efficiency, the platform is able to meet otherwise unattainable performance, space and power consumption requirements. These systems may be your only option when space, energy supply or air conditioning are highly constrained, permitting deployment on board a marine vessel, an aircraft or a land vehicle.
Your RIVYERA deployment can also scale up to any reasonable point. This is achieved by clustering your desired number of systems and making them work together as a single unit. Your operators are relieved from having to deal with the intricacies of system management by a sophisticated software framework. It negotiates between the low-level routines controlling the special-purpose hardware and the graphical or command-line user interfaces, either of which can be used. This ease of handling a RIVYERA extends to all aspects of the system.
A single rack of ten RIVYERA computers performs at supercomputer level, with several racks full of them arriving at results proportionally earlier.
SciEngines also offers field-deployable units which can run off a vehicle’s battery power or be portable. Solutions implementing custom form factors or feature sets are possible.
Table 1: Areal weight comparison of glass and ceramic – glass composite armour windows (available on the market)
HOW IS THIS ACHIEVED?
SciEngines’ special-purpose computers take a radically different approach regarding the underlying chip technology used: we leverage so-called Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) as compute units. That type of silicon chip is used in many application areas, e.g. Radar or Software-Defined Radios (SDRs).
It distinguishes itself from alternative approaches as it allows the implementation of critical parts — the cryptographic algorithms — on the hardware level. This avoids having to run comparatively slow software code. The RIVYERA system’s FPGAs can be re-programmed on the fly by a single mouse click, so that a different type of communication could be attacked. This approach, i.e. changing the inner workings of the compute units, sheds the ballast of silicon chip functionality not needed for this particular application area, making it excel in efficiency.
Many years of engineering effort went into perfecting the architecture, providing you as operator with an optimum and easy-to-use set of capabilities for your mission.
Integration with existing workflows and external systems is easy and straightforward so you could enjoy any degree of automation you deem suitable.
ACT NOW OR REGRET LATER.
Contact SciEngines to discuss with our specialists how modern cryptanalysis technology can assist you in accomplishing your mission! To get in touch with us, choose one of these contact channels:
Web: www.sciengines.com
Email: info@sciengines.com
Phone: +49-(0)431 9086 2000
SciEngines GmbH is a German company founded in 2006 as a spin-off from academic research. We design and manufacture special-purpose high-performance computers with applications in mind particularly in the areas of COMINT, C5ISR, Cyber Operations, Lawful Interception and Digital Forensics and have numerous clients across the world.