XMPP Tactical Chat Don McGregor (mcgredo at nps.edu) Don Brutzman (brutzman at nps.edu)
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Transcript of XMPP Tactical Chat Don McGregor (mcgredo at nps.edu) Don Brutzman (brutzman at nps.edu)
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
[email protected], [email protected], 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