French Navy’s surface fleet fitted with RIFAN 2 secure intranet system

The French Navy’s surface fleet has been equipped with the ‘Réseau Intranet de la Force Aéronavale étape 2’ (RIFAN 2) secure intranet system.

Worth approximately €160m, the RIFAN 2 programme contract was awarded to an industrial group led by Airbus assigned as the prime contractor.

The intranet system has been installed on-board more than 60 naval vessels, ranging from aircraft carriers and front-line frigates to support ships, patrol craft based overseas and submarines.

With the integration of RIFAN 2, the French Navy has enabled all its ships at sea to establish secure broadband links with each other and with the onshore command centre.

Other companies operating as co-contractors in the project include Naval Group and Rohde & Schwarz.

The RIFAN 2 programme has been designed to arm the French Navy’s surface vessels and submarines with a secure intranet system, in addition to transmitting data with various classification levels, ranging from ‘unprotected’ to ‘secret’ and ‘Nato secret’.

In addition, the intranet system is capable of combining several communication streams that would help optimise use of the data transmission capacity available at sea.

In addition, RIFAN 2 provides the French Navy with overall network management and cybersecurity incident monitoring capability that can be performed both from an onshore management and control centre, or locally on the navy vessels.

This provides crew members with a degree of independence that allows them to use the network depending on the operational situation.