Posted by Courtney E. Howard
MELBOURNE, Fla., 27 May 2011. Harris Corp. has received a $5.9 million order, as part of a $59.7 million indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract from the U.S. Navy for its KIK-11 Tactical Key Loader (TKL), a new lightweight device designed to simplify loading classified key fill material into military radios and other end cryptographic units. The Navy will use the rugged, small-form-factor TKL with current and future deployed tactical radios to load encryption keys into radios in the field.
Encryption keys, crucial to information security and delivering assured communications to military personnel, converts a sender's "plain-text" messages into encrypted form, and decrypts them at the receiver's end.
"The KIK-11 is an important new device that will enable forces at the tactical edge to quickly and dynamically load encryption keys into their radios, or change them when the original keys have been compromised," says Brendan O'Connell, president, Department of Defense business, Harris RF Communications. "The KIK-11 is portable, lightweight, and fast to power-on, providing military forces with faster, more reliable, and more secure communications."
Harris' Sierra II ASIC is the cryptographic module in the KIK-11 TKL platform. The KIK-11 is a crypto-modernization-compliant replacement for the legacy KYK-13 fill device.
The KIK-11 supports legacy and modern key fill interfaces and protocols, as well as USB/RS-232, and works with existing and future KMI-compliant key distribution architectures.
Harris is expecting NSA certification in early calendar year 2012 with product availability soon thereafter, says a representative.
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