Introduction

• Indian Prime minister has a vision of a Digital Armed Force. Importance of dominating the cyber space is increasing.
• He also emphasised on the role of the services in encouraging the development of domestic capabilities.

Progress in cyber space

• The government has sanctioned the raising of a cyber agency that will steer the planning and conduct of cyber warfare in the military.
• Once the doctrine has matured, the cyber agency will be expanded to a much-needed cyber command.
• Building domestic capability for the manufacture of sophisticated weapons and equipment is a major challenge.
• Despite Indian products being available, a concerted effort to use indigenous solutions is conspicuously absent, with the Army being the most laggard in this regard.

A case study

• The existence of the PRISM programme, under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collected data from internet communications.
• Leaked documents showed the very close involvement of US technology companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Apple in the programme.
• According to the documents, the NSA was collecting data directly from the servers of US service providers.
• Further revelations, disclosed by The Guardian showed that Microsoft had actively helped the NSA to circumvent its own encryption of web chats.
• America is not the only country that uses these practices.
• A recent Bloomberg report pointed out that China’s intelligence services had ordered subcontractors in China to plant malicious chips in Supermicro server motherboards bound for the US.
• Many countries have moved to restrict foreign products from use in critical networks. Examples of such ban are China and US banning each other’s products.
• India seems to be unaware of the vulnerabilities that exist in our critical networks due to foreign hardware and software.

Hardware and software in Indian armed forces

• Despite Huawei being probed for hacking a BSNL network in 2014, over 60 per cent of software and hardware being used by BSNL is sourced from either Huawei or ZTE.
• Even Australia, with a billion lesser population than India, has banned Huawei from supplying equipment for 5G mobile network, citing national security risks.
• The Air Force Network (AFNET) was launched in 2010. Present on that occasion was the Cisco country head because his company was a major supplier of equipment for AFNET.
• The army’s latest communication backbone, Network for Spectrum (NFS), also uses Cisco equipment.
• The Indian Army mostly uses the Microsoft Windows operating system on its official computers.
• Windows is an outstanding system but is a closed-source software owned by a company that is bound by US laws and historically tied to the American intelligence community.
• India is a prime target for American spying; in the overall list of countries targeted by PRISM, India stood at the fifth place.

An indigenous experiment: BOSS

• In 2015, the Northern Command of the army decided to adopt the Bharat Operating System Solutions (BOSS) for all its official computers.
• BOSS is an indigenously developed open-source system by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC).
• CDAC is the R&D organisation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.
• At the start, there were many teething problems. The user-friendliness of Windows could not be replicated and re-training of a generation that had grown up with Windows was not easy.
• They were convinced that national security cannot be subordinated to the ease of making a PowerPoint presentation.
• Three years later, the army is still debating the merits of BOSS, and the arguments are still centred on simplicity of usage, not security of networks.
• Instead of supporting BOSS, there is a push to return to Windows.
• Despite the clear dangers in cyber space, we remain inexorably tied to past practices and show little desire to make changes that are essential to protect our national interests.

Conclusion

• The Indian military should take the lead in indigenising its IT infrastructure.
• A policy decision to indigenise our cyber space will have greater and more far reaching national security implications.