The U.S. Navy has decided to start using the Linux platform to control some of its autonomous flying vehicles, in an effort to avoid potential malware attacks that could compromise its drone fleet.
Under the terms of the contract, the U.S. Navy is to pay $27,883,883 to military contractor Raytheon and calls for a "Linux transition on the tactical control system software for vertical take-off (VTOL) unmanned air vehicle ground control stations."
The Navy currently has just one VTOL drone model, but hopes to have 168 eventually, The Register reported. Northrop Grumman's MQ-8B Fire Scout "has the ability to autonomously take off and land on any aviation-capable warship and at prepared and unprepared landing zones in proximity to the soldier in contact."
The Navy's drone has already been deployed to search for drug smugglers on sea for use off Latin America. According to the Navy, the MQ-8B Fire Scout can fly for more than six hours on a tank of gas, with a top speed of roughly 85 knots and a ceiling of about 20,000 feet.
Security Reasons
The U.S. military has previously worked with less-reliable operating systems, but has some experience with Linux as well. "While the US military has been a growing user of Linux, the contract might also have something to do with the swabbies learning from the mistakes made by the flyboys and girls in the US Air Force," wrote The Register. "After a malware attack on the Air Force's Windows-based drone-control system last year, there has been a wholesale move to Linux for security reasons."
"If I would need to select between Windows XP and a Linux based system while building a military system, I wouldn't doubt a second which one I would take," said Mikko Hyppoenen, security researcher at F-Secure, as cited by The Register.
Guidelines
The U.S. Department of Defense is prepared for the Linux integration as well, and has provided guidelines on how its agencies can use open-source code. "The US government can directly combine GPL and proprietary/classified software into a single program arbitrarily, as long as the result is never conveyed outside the U.S. government, but this approach should be taken lightly," state the guidelines. "When taking this approach, contractors hired to modify the software must not retain copyright or other rights to the result (else the software would be conveyed outside the US government)."
