Impressive, he thought as he walked up to the ring-shaped structure’s main entrance, but then IDSD tended to treat science and technology with respect. The Internationals’ military, aimed at preventing war, not making it, and at reducing the probability of casualties where a war had already broken out, was, and had been from the start, a smart, advanced force, intent on quality more than quantity.
As he entered the lobby of the building, a security agent met him. The security system would have identified him as he approached, but this was one of the places in this secure complex where this would not be enough. The security agent led him across the floor, where some finishing works were clearly still being done, to the internal ring, and to a glass elevator mounted on its inner rim, overlooking the center of the building. As the elevator ascended, Donovan saw that the entire inner courtyard was designed as a lush garden, with cobblestone paths winding through it and tables of varying sizes and shapes strewn around, none occupied just then. A comfortable place for a momentary reprieve, he imagined, perhaps a place for the creative minds in this building to work in under the domed skylight above.
The elevator opened to a corridor that stretched to his left and right, disappearing from view with the gentle curve of the building. Across the corridor he saw a set of double doors with the Sirion logo on them, and as he walked toward them—the security agent remaining just outside the elevator—they slid open to reveal a technology lab. Spacious, built to facilitate easy interaction between the people working in it. Polished clean, although here too there were obvious signs that the place was still being adapted to its occupants, who had moved here less than two weeks before. Advanced computing and visualization technologies lined multiple workspaces constructed to optimize team work, and a simulator the likes of which Donovan hadn’t seen before stood in a far corner. Behind a transparent partition ahead, he could see people working around a disassembled aircraft, no wings, all its systems exposed and connected to a staggering amount of equipment.
Despite the relatively late hour, many of the project’s personnel were there. The ambience was quiet. Pensive, Donovan thought. None of the people he saw were smiling, and quite a few were standing in small groups, speaking in hushed voices.
“They don’t want to leave, and are trying to occupy themselves, keep their minds on what they do best. This day has been difficult for everyone.”
Donovan turned around. The voice belonged to a smallish, silver-haired man with old-fashioned spectacles sitting low on his nose, his eyes peering over them, not at Donovan but at the lab’s obviously perturbed occupants.
“You must understand, this comes as a shock to us all,” the man continued. “We have been working on Sirion for a long time, and all the amazing people involved in its creation have put their hearts and souls into it. To discover that while they have been working so hard, someone has been stealing it and has used it for the purpose it was used for, to hurt people, is a terrible shock for them. And not in the least, Joseph’s death . . .” He shook his head and turned to Donovan. “I’m Dr. Dori Beinhart. Co-head of Project Sirion for IDSDATR. And you are Special Agent in Charge Donovan Pierce, USFID-SIRT.” He offered his hand, and Donovan wasn’t surprised at the firm, resolute shake. He turned back to where the disassembled aircraft stood and strained to see.
“It’s not here. It’s at our Mons air base, on its way back from a field test. That’s why . . . that’s how a Sirion team was there to confirm that what happened was . . . that it was our creation that did this.” Beinhart’s voice was quiet, pained.
Donovan frowned. “Major Berman wasn’t with them?”
“He was until yesterday. We were using our main testing site this time, and they are prepared for us there, so he chose to return here early to set up our next testing site, a new one.”
“What was Major Berman like?” Donovan let the older man lead him to a small office at the right end of the room, under the somber gazes of everyone in the lab.
“Joseph was an excellent man. Excellent. He was reliable, endlessly patient, and had a way with people. He was uniquely efficient in managing all contacts between ARPA and us, the people and the organizations alike, and between this project and all military and civilian elements whose assistance we required to test Sirion in its various stages. Thanks to him, all aspects of the Sirion project ran smoothly, smoother than in any other project I have ever been part of, in fact. You know, at the beginning he worked on other tactical technology projects alongside ours, and as we progressed into the more elaborate testing stage we—my ARPA counterpart and I—did not hesitate to ask that he be assigned exclusively to us. No, he was not involved in this, in hurting us, and I’d stake my life on it. We all would.” Beinhart nodded to himself with a finality that did not invite an argument.
Donovan said nothing. This would not be the first time people close to perpetrators were sure of their innocence. He never let that affect him.
“Who has access to Sirion?” he asked.
“The people working on it, whether IDSDATR or ARPA, we all have complete access, that’s the way it works best. Project sub-teams participate in meetings according to the subject being discussed, but we place no limitations on these meetings being attended in real time or viewed later by anyone in the project, and we certainly encourage inter-team discussions. It is conducive both to the formation of new ideas and to critical thinking.”
“What about administrative staff?”
“No, they had no access to Sirion, not at all. Joseph took care of that side of things, too.”
“Is the actual work on Sirion done only here?” Donovan indicated the aircraft in the next room.
“Yes, this is the main working floor, used by all of us—some of the people you see here are ARPA, they were already here when . . . when we heard. We do travel for on-aircraft testing, though.”
“I suppose I don’t need to ask you what Sirion can do, all considering.”
Beinhart sat down behind his desk, and leaned forward in his chair, agitated. “No, please, you must understand, Sirion isn’t a bad thing. It’s a great idea. It’s a life saver, don’t you see? It came about thanks to Jamey, Dr. Jamey Black, he heads the conceptual side of the project. When he was a young child, his parents were traveling, his father was piloting their small plane, there was a seal problem and they lost consciousness. When they didn’t respond to the air traffic controllers’ calls and crossed into restricted airspace, military fighters were sent to intercept them. The pilots saw them through the windows, apparently unconscious, but could do nothing but follow the plane until it crashed into the sea. The aircraft had an autopilot, but it wasn’t engaged, Jamey says his father loved to pilot the plane himself.”
He sighed. “Jamey himself grew up to become a pilot, he flew jets for IDSD for a while. Much like the one that was taken, the jet with the ambassador on it. His experience, together with his investigation of what happened to his parents all those years ago, have led him to come up with the idea of Sirion.” He spread his hands beseechingly, desperate to make Donovan understand. “You see, Sirion was designed to take control of any aircraft, manned or unmanned. Eventually, when it is completed, it will be able to do so at any stage of the flight, no matter where the aircraft is, how high up, over land or over water, and regardless of its speed, maneuverability, stealth or cloaking capability. Anything you can think of, Sirion will be able to deal with. It will lock on the aircraft’s systems, all of them simultaneously, take them over without anyone being able to break its control, or even being able to trace it, and bring the aircraft wherever we want it to go, safely.
“If Sirion had been in existence back when the plane with Jamey’s parents in it ran into trouble, it could have been controlled from afar and brought to land remotely, and they might have been saved. And that’s only one application. Think of the possibilities—aircraft that malfunction in the air, flights in which pilots lose capacity, aircraft that are being hijacked . . .” His voice tapered off as he
remembered that Sirion had in fact been used to the contrary, not to save a hijacked aircraft but to cause the hijacking, to cause death and grief. “Jamey is broken over what happened to that ambassador, to the people on that jet.”
“Can you explain to me how it works?” Donovan brought Beinhart’s thoughts back on track. He needed to understand more about this thing, what made it so special, so unique that it was kept a secret, and that someone would go to the length they did to steal it and murder for it.
“I’ve already explained it to that other investigator from Brussels, I forget his name, he called me to . . .” Beinhart sighed. “Yes, of course, I understand you need to know. Of course. Well, as I said, say we have a situation where we need to take control of a malfunctioning aircraft, or perhaps a hijacked airliner where someone on board manages to block our access to the autopilot so that the airliner can’t be controlled from the ground, to bring it to safety. Or we need to take control of an enemy aircraft on its way to an attack, in which case we want to take complete control to ensure that, say, a bomb can’t be dropped or information can’t be passed to whoever has sent it about what’s happening to it. In any such case, in fact whenever an aircraft needs to be taken over, Sirion is designed to near simultaneously take over the entire aircraft, all its systems. Everything on board becomes our puppet, and the pilots—if the aircraft is manned—can’t do anything. And this is done through the satellite data link which all aircraft now have.”
“I thought it wasn’t possible anymore, to do this. That data links are secure, that they can’t simply be hacked.”
“You’re right. Lessons were learned. There is a layered authentication protocol for all aircraft—different for civilian and military, and between certain classes of aircraft, too, to accommodate not only security but also the various needs of, say, ground stations for drones and air traffic control for airliners. And in some cases, there are also entity-specific layers, like IDSD has for its military and diplomatic aircraft, as an example—the internal layers are IDSD only, allowing the aircraft to still communicate its location to authorized ATCs while adding the internal authentication layers to block unwarranted access to the aircraft, such as if, say, someone wanted to upload false flight path corrections to the autopilot, malicious acts such as that. Anything that might pose risk to the aircraft. Basically, they have to pass multiple escalating access authorizations within the layered protocol, and even then, they still can’t take control of the aircraft, these options were neutralized over the years through reengineering or the isolation of in-flight systems from avionics or . . .” he fell silent, perturbed. “What Sirion does is use the layered protocol against itself. It runs a cascading takeover from the outside-most layer to the internal-most one, and then it rides on the internal layers while the ones immediately outside them are reconfigured to act as isolating layers that prevent interference with its function. I won’t go into the technical details, you understand.”
“So it takes over the autopilot?”
“Sirion takes over everything on board,” Beinhart stressed. “Consider the ambassador’s jet. As I understand, it’s a three-year-old fly-by-wireless with fiber optics fallback systems. Full separation of its in-flight systems from its avionics, that’s a given, but it wouldn’t matter in this case, our technology uses a number of contact points to take over all the aircraft’s systems. And once it does, once Sirion has a lock on the aircraft, no one can take control of it back.”
“So you take and maintain total control.”
“Sirion does, yes. To maintain constant control of the aircraft, reliably so, of course, we use overlapping satellite coverage. In the testing stages we’re using only our own satellites, and we will continue to use them as the core control platform. But once Sirion goes into use, we’ll use allies’ satellites as backups, a secondary security layer to increase our assurance of continuous control. We have already developed this feature and will be adding it in the next revision. And, just in case, we have a team that is designing into the specs a tertiary security layer to ensure continuity of control, one that will employ the communications capabilities of friendly aircraft in the air at the time. This is an ad hoc backup network, as it were, to help bounce communications to and from the target aircraft. Since our own protocol is secure, we’ll be able to do this without significant added risk. No latency, of course. That’s the idea.” Beinhart spoke with pride. “For the fully operational Sirion, when it’s completed, we will effectively be creating a closed, isolated avionic network, and this would increase communication—and therefore control—stability, predictability and reliability, and reduce both latency and susceptibility to security attacks.”
“Whoever hijacked the ambassador’s jet wouldn’t have that, backups they can use. So they took a risk,” Donovan said thoughtfully.
“Not necessarily. They kept the jet in the air for a very limited time and a very limited distance—as I understand, it originally took off from Split and was landed on Cres. There wasn’t much of a risk there.”
“Could they have used IDSD satellites? If you’re already capable of using them, can they?”
“Of course not, that requires external authorizations and satellite tasking. They must have changed that part of the protocol.” He frowned. “No, we would have been alerted. We can’t know whose satellite they used, not even if it’s private or not. All we were able to ascertain is that it doesn’t belong to anyone in the alliance. Look, we originally designed the protocol to mask certain information, for confidentiality purposes. I remind you that the existence of this technology wasn’t supposed to be known. Not even the instances in which it might have been used, especially if non-friendly aircraft were involved.”
“Okay. So they’re holding a technology that can already now take over an aircraft’s data link, access all the aircraft’s systems, and take them over, and they can potentially continue to develop it as you would have developed Sirion, to eventually be able to take over any civilian and military aircraft.”
“Eventually,” Beinhart said with a somber expression. “That was our original aim, and the basics are therefore already built into the architecture. So theoretically they could do that, with time. I mean, they got as far as they did, so they obviously have what it takes.”
Donovan contemplated what all this meant. That the ambassador and the people traveling with him never had a chance. That the capability to irreversibly take over an aircraft and get away with it was now in the hands of an unknown element that had already demonstrated its intentions. He shook his head. “What about a countermeasure? Somehow blocking Sirion, which now means also blocking their version of it?”
“Well,” Beinhart began, then paused, suddenly hesitant, it seemed to Donovan. “One of the issues we faced was in fact the need to prevent attempted hacking into our protocol by someone who might realize that Sirion has taken control of an aircraft or is in the process of doing so and would want to take that control back. One of Sirion’s strengths is in its ability to block such attempts to take back the aircraft or even just release it from its control. You see, we recognized that since people created Sirion’s takeover protocol, we need to assume that at some point there will be people who can break it. So in addition to the designated encryption we created to prevent a network breach, Sirion can detect any attempt to interfere with it, and can block it.”
“Okay.” Donovan frowned.
“But it doesn’t matter anyway. Even at the very moment Sirion begins its takeover, the way we designed it no anomaly will be detected by the aircraft’s systems and so no defenses on board or in any watching ground station will be activated, certainly not until it’s too late, and that also means that no fallback systems on board will be reverted to, something that could interfere with our hold on the aircraft’s systems if it were to happen.” He stopped, shifted in his seat. “Look, Sirion can override all protocols, all alliance and non-alliance technologies, current and . . .” He stopped again. “It just can’t be
interfered with, Agent Pierce. It’s as simple as that. Just . . . yes, we’ll have to develop a countermeasure, try to at least, but—” He shook his head in something close to despair. “It was supposed to be used by us, used for the right reasons, not—”
“Dr. Beinhart.” Donovan met the eyes of the co-head of the Sirion project with unrelenting focus in his. “What aren’t you telling me?”
Beinhart let out a heavy breath. “Yes, well, no real reason not to tell you, is there? Sirion is not a secret anymore, it’s already been stolen. And you’re here to find whoever has it, to prevent further use of it, I hope. Yes.” He braced himself. “Right then. You see, Sirion can learn. Or will be able to learn once we reach that stage in its development. Learn new data link security protocols it encounters, detect attempts to hack it and learn from them, learn the system trying to interfere with it and how best to block it.” He paused. “It’s a smart technology. It analyzes, learns, then overrides.”
The furrow in Donovan’s brow deepened. “You’re telling me these people stole a technology that can’t be stopped?”
“Well, this feature hasn’t been completed yet. But the intention is clear in the architecture. Someone with enough resources would eventually figure out what we were aiming at and complete this part of it.” Beinhart passed a hand over his face. “It wasn’t supposed to be stolen. God.”
Donovan considered him for a long moment, then turned in his seat and took a look at the disassembled aircraft. “What does it look like, how big is it?”
“It’s basically a flight deck,” Beinhart said, clearly relieved to leave all thoughts of the implications of the theft behind. “It’s complex, because of the need, ultimately, to take over and control all systems on board aircraft of varying complexity, from, say, an armed UAV to a jet fighter or an airliner. And, of course, the need to prevent detection of the controlled aircraft for as long as possible, by keeping it away from air traffic but also by scrambling signals, if needed. All means will be employed, that’s the idea. The flight deck houses the computer systems that do the work but also the people needed to monitor these, intervene if needed. There are considerations they would be needed for, at least in the learning stages, such as if new information comes in that requires a course change or, say, if the need arises to incapacitate everyone on board by decompressing the aircraft . . .” He halted, then stammered, “As was the case with the ambassador’s jet, I mean.”
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