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US Military Develops P2P Wireless Network Sniffer
Merlin83 writes "As being reported on The Register, the US Military is developing a new system for monitoring enemy battlefield communication. Called WolfPack, each node is a 6"x4" cylinder, launched by missile or dropped from aircraft. Once the node lands, it stands up, extends its antenna and contacts other nodes. The nodes can also jam cellular communications by transmitting a signal themselves. "
Well, let's see - it's a 6' by 4' metal cylinder, that has to be dropped from an airplane or launched and deployed from a missile into a possibly hostile environment (hot/cold/dusty/wet), yet still reliably remain intact enough to right itself on a surface that is most likely not flat, deploy its antenna and function for two months off a single battery charge.
$10,000 sounds like a bargain.
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...that seems to be mainly aimed at countering themselfs.
Wait, don't mod me down just yet; let me elaborate on that. Basicly, you have two situations when in a military conflict: Either you are invading, in which cause you depend on mobile, wireless communication. Or you're defending, and that means most of the time relying on fixed lines of communication (fiberoptic cables buried deep in the ground is a favorite). Now, if you're using fixed lines of communications, you don't have to worry to much about these. Sure, some forms of landlines are radiates energy that can be detected by the 'wolfpack', but I've yet to hear about any armed forces worth it's salt that don't use encryption these days. If you're attacking however, you need to carry your own coms. Most armed forces don't roll in money the way the US forces do, so most forces has to rely on older equipment, like the good old AN/PRC-77. And those can't be affected by a jammer designed to knock out cellular transmittions.
On the lighter side, how long until the troops use this P2P-network to share violent videos and hard porn?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
those nodes probably wouldn't even have the capability to decode the signals they would be relaying, the would probably not be useful for determining what the message contained.
The guy that thought up the idea of a central state location hub for overnight delivery didn't get a very good grade on his paper either. He just went on and started FedEx.
Don't get discouraged by narrow-minded instructors.
Sorry, I don't usually bicker about movie details in Slashdot posts--but this has always been something that bothered me since I was a kid. What were the odds of a single drone happpening upon the rebel base on an entire planet?
Not if you can make them cheap enough that you can have considerable overlap in coverage.
if your maximum p2p range is 500 feet, and you have dropped these sensors every 100 feet, it would take a sharpshooter a LOT of ammo to make a big enough hole in this thing to sneak through... and by then, someone has already noticed that sensors have started malfunctioning in a strange way...
yes, but if you had access to one couldn't you use it to send your own encrypted message accross the network they create? then the jamming they do to your other signals won't really mean much. though the military would probably then intercept your own encrypted message.
but a few sparse well placed messages cannot easily be unencrypted in a timely fashion to be useful to the party trying to decode it, especially if you continually change your encryption methods.
What were the odds of a single drone happpening upon the rebel base on an entire planet?
Do a couple orbits around the planets in a system scanning for the strongest power source and start there. We are never really told how long the probes had been out there, But we can assume a good little while because of teh time that had passed between New Hope and Empire. Also we don't really know how close the Star Destroyer fleet was to Hoth on top of that. It's quite probable that they got a bit lucky.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
> NASA would have charged them $10,000,000 for the same thing. The only difference is instead of olive drab, it would have that gold foil stuff on the outside.
You forget, the NASA cylinders would be certified for a drop on Mars.
The unofficial
It's not terribly practical.
Such a device would have to do more than eavesdrop and relay. It has to continually broadcast to let cell phones know it exists. This will likely consume a lot more power than the military device.
Such a device would almost by definition only be used in emergencies, where phone usage is expected to peak. The current design monitors battlefield communications, which is likely to be a lot less traffic. It will, in essence, be slashdotted while running on battery.
Such a device would have to connect to the real phone network. Normal cell sites have buried cables to transmit, while this device would probably have to use satellite. The inherent satellite hop delays will wreak havoc on cellular protocols*. Talking to the satellite, of course, also requires more power than talking to cell phones.
Cell towers are towers for a reason: the height is crucial to achieve coverage (of perhaps 2 miles radius). Such a device could not easily get line-of-sight to a lot of potential users if it was simply airdropped. Absent appropriate terrain (like a hill without trees), they have to be installed manually on towers unless you want to contemplate technology for these devices to hoist themselves up a hundred feet or so.
Now, all of that to replace a guy driving a truck with a few cans of diesel? (Seriously, many emergency response plans include setting up satellite-based communications.)
* The easiest problem to understand is that satellite delays mess up cellular protocol timeouts, which are designed to communicate at light speed over a couple of miles. Put simply, you can't make a satellite phone out of a cell phone by simply boosting its transmission signal.
from the article: without hindering US forces' own communications systems. Clearly the DoD thought this through a little more than most people here give them credit for.
IMO this is a really cool project. All the people complaining about the gamma ray "nuke" should be happy about this method of disrupting communications without bombing things.
I know you're probably just trolling, but what the hell:
"someone wanted to call it "Operation Iraqi liberation" but for some reason they abadonded that"
It was a little too meaningful. It spells OIL.
"I think this was a good thing as the word "liberation" is a reference to a french word."
Along with alot of our language; notably "Operation".
"In a perfect world this would not be neccesary, but as long as the public is so relluctant to wars in general this is a good way to convince them to fight for the country in wars that are neccesary but hard to understand ordinary non-educated workers."
Lying to them works well too. In fact, both techniques work equally well regardless of whether the war is necessary. Anyway, it's sure a good thing we have these smart people deciding whether a war is necessary, then selling it to the people by any means possible. I mean, if they just presented the actual facts and let people make up their own minds, the people might think they lived in a democracy or something.
And while we're at it, I suspect even most of the "ordinary non-educated workers" you think ought to be led about like sheep could demonstrate a better grasp of basic gramar that you did in that last sentence.
"Proud Patriot and Republican voter"
Why do I suspect this means "Blind Follower and Blind Follower"? I'm a proud patriot, which I think compels me to look more deeply at candidates than their party affiliation. I even voted for a Republican once.