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Army program for secure Android kernel technology gets attention of NSA and White House
Development strategy allows military smart phones to securely access classified networks
By Henry KenyonOct 11, 2011

A major hurdle preventing the wider deployment of smart phones across the U.S. military may have been overcome, and it’s got the White House’s attention.

One of the key problems in providing wireless devices to military personnel is securing communications and providing some type of user verification. A research team from Google, George Mason University and the National Security Agency has potentially solved this by developing a hardened kernel for the Android 3.0 operating system. The kernel, which is in the final stages of certification testing, opens the way for the Army to begin issuing smart phones or tablet type wireless devices to troops in combat operations.

The White House has also been following the Army’s efforts because the hardened kernel capability could help fulfill a government plan to create a secure national wireless network for first responders, said Michael McCarthy, operations director of the Army’s Brigade Modernization Command’s Mission Command Complex, who spoke to Defense Systems at the AUSA Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington on October 10. McCarthy also heads the service’s Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications (CSDA) program, the lead organization involved in selecting handheld wireless technologies for military use.

One of the problems vexing Army smart phones has been getting the right security accreditation to operate on military networks and eventually on classified networks. This is particularly important to allow smart phones to connect into battlefield networks, McCarthy said. The initial goal is to get the hardware and software accredited. “We have to have a way to verify the identity of the user of the smart phone. So it’s a triple level security measure that we have to deal with,” he said.

But there were delays in getting the operating system accredited until the NSA came forward several months ago and offered to expedite the approval process, McCarthy said. The new effort kicked off with a series of meetings with CSDA program personnel and representatives from the NSA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Android kernel about a month ago is now being tested for a Federal Information Processing Standard 104-2 certification, which is expected by mid-October. “That’s the first level of security that we’ve got to get before we start moving onto being able to ultimately do secret,” he said.