SCIF and Radio Frequency Secured Facility Design (2021) | Hacker News Reader

SCIF and Radio Frequency Secured Facility Design (2021)

incompliancemag.com

33 pointstranspute7 comments

Misery is working in an approved SCIF. I've been in them. During the Cold War, they were like this.

There's a big, mostly empty room. Inside it is a big metal box made of steel panels welded together with visible welds. Thick solid steel. The thing looks like a big metal tank, and that's what it's called. They're usually painted industrial grey. There are, of course, no windows.

The box is raised about two feet above floor level, so it can be inspected underneath. There's clearance on all six sides for inspection. You go in through an double door airlock-type arrangement. When each door is closed, a compressed-air system forces conductive tines against each doorframe for RF tightness. Power goes in via big RF filter boxes. Data involves hardware crypto units and fiber optics. If there's a connection, it's to another similar tank elsewhere.

These tanks are inspected by people who put an RF transmitter inside and then go around the outside with antennas and receivers to see if they can get anything from the transmitter.

This is completely separate from physical security. The alarms, guards, and cameras protect the outer room, so nobody gets close to the outside of the tank.

These steel boxes were no larger than necessary. Much like working in a shipping container. No decoration or unnecessary objects inside. Not grim, but military functional.

When you finally get inside the box, the impression is more likely to be "you still have one of those running?" than "wow, that's advanced!". The advanced technology will be in some very specific mission-critical area, and everything else will be way behind. This reflects long DoD procurement cycles.

People working in highly classified environments tend to stagnate. They get stuck on old technology. That's why I got out of that sort of thing.

Very true, but there are full SCIFs that aren't just metal boxes. Permanent dedicated SCIF facilities (not SCIFs inside other buildings) are much more like datacenters inside without the server racks obviously. Pretty unremarkable working environment. Not uncomfortable.

But yeah the technology was crazy behind. Everyone on mission was on OLD Sun sparc boxes running Solaris in the mid-2000s.

In my job as an Analyst/Terminal Operator in support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, J4 Logistics Readiness Center in the National Military Command Center (NMCC) inside the Pentagon, I found that the entire NMCC was a SCIF and that it was not that different from any other group of offices in the Pentagon. Okay, it was on raised datacenter style flooring, but that was more because you had all these cables that needed to run through the flooring and for handling the cooling, than anything else.

You had the security guards at the entrances, and you had to leave your backpacks and pagers and cell phones at the entrance, and there were no windows, but otherwise it wasn't really much different from any other office in the building. There were desks inside, they had STU-III classified phones, they had coffee makers, they had TVs connected to internal cable TV networks, some rooms had red phones, they had classified WWMCCS terminals inside, and so on.

Our part of the Defense Information Systems Agency was disbanded after Desert Shield, and the personnel were scattered to the four winds. I was on the short list to go to the Red Phone project at the NSA, but they instead grabbed me for the internal IT group responsible for doing all IT support for the DISAnet network. After that, I didn't do any classified work, so I don't know for sure how things evolved in the classified arena.

But I would imagine that smaller SCIFs might be something like a highly customized shipping container, sure.

If your experience is from the Cold War then, just offer it as a historical oddity. No need for the melodrama of, "It's misery." Modern scifs can have windows. They can be open. If you had been paying attention you could've seen the articles with the pictures.

And you're complaining about them stagnating and getting stuck on the old ways.

Part 2 (May 2022), https://incompliancemag.com/article/scif-and-radio-frequency...

> Whether it is used for power, communication, data, or building management systems, a component than includes or uses conductive cables or wires needs to be filtered to maximize the RF performance of a shielding system ... If it is conductive, it has the ability to carry signals and radiate similar to an antenna. Similarly, critical or protected signals are at risk of coupling to those cables or wires and leaving the secured space ... a cost-effective solution may be to use fiber-optics in the secure space that can penetrate the shielding through an inexpensive RF waveguide or series of RF waveguides.

You think of fiber being primarily something you use for its increased bandwidth and speed, so it's wild seeing fiber run to the desk just to be plugged into a thin/zero client. Also... the concept of "bend radius" is foreign and, accordingly, is prohibited from entering. Apparently, those fiber cables aren't actually as fragile as one is led to believe in the commercial world.

Interesting WaPo article on what SCIFs are and how many people have access.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive...

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