A smartphone app that allows users to communicate with each other over apparently impenetrable peer-to-peer networks is causing a headache for counterterrorism officials in India, New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV) reported Sunday.

The Indian Army and its signals-collection unit, the National Technical Research Organization (NTRO), are among several federal agencies currently investigating “Calculator,” a “cognitive digital radio” smartphone application allegedly being used by South Asian terror group Lashker-e-Taiba in order to evade surveillance while mounting military campaigns campaign in contested Jammu and Kashmir.

Indian officials recently learned through interrogations that Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists developed the app so that users can send and receive text messages without relying on wireless and mobile phone networks that can be easily monitored by local authorities, NDTV reported.

By relying on “cognitive digital radio” technology, the app reportedly allows smartphone users to communicate over dynamically created wireless mesh networks in lieu of more mainstream protocols that are more likely to be the subject of surveillance.

“Cognitive digital radio” was first coined in 1999 by a Royal Institute of Technology doctoral student who set out to examine the intersection of personal digital assistants, specifically with respect to ensuring modern communication devices of the time and the networks they relied on were “sufficiently computationally intelligent about radio resources and related computer-to-computer communications,” according to his dissertation paper on the topic.

The NTRO traditionally relies on technical intercepts to stay ahead of terrorists, but authorities have so far been unsuccessful in cracking communications sent between Calculator users and handlers in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the Press Trust of India reported Monday.

Lashker-e-Taiba terrorists have successfully infiltrated Kashmir about 35 times so far in 2016 — two more than the total number of successful infiltrations during all of 2015, according to the Press Trust of India. Individuals caught with the Calculator app installed on their phone in recent weeks had configured the devices specifically to receive terrain and route information used to sneak across borders, the agency added.

While suspected terrorists in India use ad hoc networks to stay off the grid, however, commercial products that incorporate similar technology have earned praise in the West.

In New York City, the Gothamist website last year ranked a commercial cognitive digital radio device that pairs with Apple and Android smartphones, the “goTenna,” on its list of 16 travel essentials for 2016. A product of Hurricane Katrina, the makers of the goTenna designed their device with the goal of ensuring natural disasters and other emergency situations don’t preclude people from being able to communicate over otherwise ubiqutous platforms, like cellular bands and Wi-Fi networks that may end up offline in exigent circumstances. In November, the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development awarded a grant to the makers of the device in order to provide goTennas to 10,000 small businesses across New York City.

“Public safety and military personnel depend on radio frequency (RF) technology, but what they use requires training, and are very heavy and expensive. By marrying smartphones’ ease­-of-­use and computing power to tried­-and-­true RF technology we’ve made goTenna a low-­power, low-­cost, deceptively intelligent device that feels like any messaging app — except it’ll work when no other can,” goTenna CEO Daniela Perdomo said at the time.

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