XMPP Tactical Chat

Don McGregor (mcgredo at nps.edu)Don Brutzman (brutzman at nps.edu)

Military Chat

Chat is used for a lot of things in the military:

• Navy bridge to bridge comms• Logistics support• Mission planningIn theory it’s not an official command &

control link--in reality it is

Military Chat: Standards

Chat grew from the bottom up; individual commands and organizations “unofficially” deployed it.

This means there was no initial standards or design effort; lots of incompatible chat systems out there

There may be other problems: unaudited code, no authentication of users/roles, etc

Military Chat

Human factors is huge and unexplored• Often one user monitoring dozens of chat rooms;

designated guy to monitor chat• Vigilance task, which humans are notoriously bad

at; “sit here and wait for something to happen”• How do we scale to very large numbers of people

in a chat room? • The military uses chat for different things than the

public; often goal-oriented rather than open-ended

• Multi-level security, coalition security, etc.

Military Domain-Specific Chat

Right now many chat clients attempt to be general purpose. But why shouldn’t we have different chat applications for different tasks?

When working in a 2,000 user chat room, use an application that does that well.

When working w/ something that requires vigilance, have an app that alerts you to new data

Platoon leader can’t be heads down in a firefight; have an implementation that does voice or audio from a PDA

AUV Workbench uses embedded chat

XMPP

XMPP has been adopted as the mandatory standard for chat by the DoD IT Standards Registry; no other chat protocol has been approved

http://www.xmpp.org/http://www.igniterealtime.org/Open standards and open source

implementations

XMPP

XMPP IDs are very similar to mail addresses

smith@xmpp.nps.edu, jones@xmpp.navy.mil, etc

The usernames can be tied to existing enterprise LDAP user databases

No one grand user database for all of XMPP--each server maintains its own user database

XMPP

XMPPServer

XMPPServer

Client Client

TLS encryptedXML stream onPort TCP 5222

Server-to-Server XMLComms on TCP 5269

XMPP

JFCOM has been working on a military, multi-level security XMPP client implementation, Transverse

Translation, coalition features, etc

XMPP as Comms Backplane

Since XMPP is XML and distributes messages well, why not use this capability to have devices talk to each other?

Distributed Interactive Simulation--use XMPP as a data bridge for real-time data

JTC--use XMPP as a planning tool, sending maps and drawings across XMPP

XMPP

Device w/ JIDShared Chatroom

Blackboard

Device User

XMPP XML-EnabledCommunicationsBackplane

JTC

JTC uses XMPP chat rooms as shared blackboards to pass information:

• Conventional chat• Specify map regions• Collaborative map modification

XMPP: Conclusions

The standard provides a platform on which to build

Focus should now shift to using the standard to solve problems

DoD should encourage innovation at the application level; it is much too early to standardize or limit XMPP-enabled applications