Wi-Fi Hack Aids Boarding Parties

Kage-Yojimbo writes with a link to the site Strategy Page. There, they're reporting on a military adaptation of civilian wi-fi equipment to use in boarding operations on the high seas. Modifications to normal off-the-shelf gear can result in a range of over 700 meters, allowing information to be passed through on-shore internet connections. "The main reason for all this was to speed up the transmission of passport photos and other personal data back to the ship, so that it could be run through databases to check for terrorists or criminals. This wi-fi hack cut several hours off the time required to check documents. The Expanded Maritime Interception Operations (EIMO) wireless system was developed last year, to provide several kilometers of range to the original wi-fi gear (which has been in use for over three years). Each pair of wi-fi units costs about $1400 to construct, using common parts to add more powerful antennae to standard 802.11g wi-fi equipment."

Comments

$1400?

[PHAEDRU5]

Seems a lot for a Pringles can (http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448)

Re:$1400?

[Robber Baron]

Seems a lot for a Pringles can Remember we're talking about an institution that pays $5000 for a screw and $20000 for a toilet seat...$1400 for a pair of Pringles cans is cheap by comparison.

Re:$1400?

[xSauronx]

Or basic WISP equipment. Tranzeo has 4.9ghz systems that start at $433 per radio, and can do a good 5 miles or so. Each unit can act as a client, a bridge, or an AP (they sell directional units, and units with n-connectors so you can attach a direction or omni antenna) Ive installed their 2.4ghz radios as far as 5 miles from an AP. $1400 bucks for a pair of radios seems a bit much, IMO. Not that the article was heavy on details anyway.

Re:$1400?

[rs79]

"and $20000 for a toilet seat"

It was $10,000 not $20,000. It later came to light this was hoy money for covert operations was being found.

Re:$1400?

[djmcmath]

It's the US Navy. If there's a $5 solution commercially available, we can guarantee that it will cost $500, and be delivered 20% past deadline. We're also very good at signing contracts that won't expire until the technology that we've contracted has been obsolete for 20 years. No worries, finest Navy in the world, right here, boys.

Re:$1400?

[rickb928]

As a former resident of Maine, I know the Bath Iron Works fairly well, and have family members that still work there. The Yard has a deserved reputation for delivering boats ahead of schedule and under budget, and better-built than either requested or expected. Even the Harley Burke class (Aegis) which they had to share some design work with Ingalls on, much to their detriment and consternation. It was a matter of pride at the Yard to survive the inevitable updates, changes, and interference by the Navy and other yards, and launch better and better boats. The Burkes, in particular, took long enough to build that most of the electronics went through a full generation of development. BIW developed innovative methods and used CAD (for the first time in Navy shipbuilding, believe it or not) to adapt to changes and do more with less. The newest program required them to participate in a design-off with Ingalls (and Newport News I think), and led to a 'joint' design. My former brother in law, a navy liason engineer, literally cried talking about how many compromises were endured working with other yards, and how much more money it would cost, the fights over overruns, and the shoddy engineering other yards were imposing on the process. His best quote: 'They intend to fix it in the water'. Second best quote: 'We just don't build boats in Bath with problems. We expect our boats to SERVE our sailors!'

In Bath, at least, delivering the best value and best boat is still a matter of pride to the entire operation.

And yes, I don't doubt there is waste. To bring this back on topic, I can imagine the idea that a $1400 Pringles can solution is pretty wasteful. Just consider this - put one of your Pringles cans on a styrofoam float in a fountain, and see if it still works in a breeze. With boats pitching and rolling, I'd spec a DS solution, something Breezecom used to make. I've gotten 15km out of them, and easily 5km with just Yagi antennae. For this application,an LNA for the receivers would solve it, but marine duty is harsh. Everything corrodes. Expect a working life of 6 months for connectors, and 2 years max for the black boxes. And expect the antenna to get snapped off 3-4 times a year, either striking the boat when launching/recovering, or accidentally when the boarded ship somehow gaffs it instead of reaching the sailor. "Woops, was that important?".

rick

Re:$1400?

[who's got my nicknam]

Okay - yes, Tranzeo, yes, in a marine environment, no, not on naval or patrol vessels, but on a commercial fishing vessel. 5 kilometres, ship-to-shore. $150 CAD per radio (2 required), 2.4ghz. Horizontal polarisation, approximate antenna height above sea surface was 5 metres. Sure, we had to manually keep the yagi aligned with the shore station, but that's because I was too cheap to build a gyro system. With a 30-degree spread, the yagi was actually pretty forgiving. Actual throughput around 1.8Mbps. On land, I have installed Tranzeo radios over 12km apart - and those are only putting out 80mw (19db gain flat-panel antennas). They rock. Back on topic, people have gotten 50km out of "off-the-shelf" wifi gear (ie, consumer-grade gear from Best Buy, like a Linksys box), simply by placing the antennas at the focal point of large parabolic dishes. This isn't an increase in power output, but rather an increase in GAIN. Antenna gain is the crucial thing here - but you need to have similar gain levels at both ends (duh). Back in the day, I was setting up wifi links in the 10km range using 30mw radio gear from Orinoco and high-gain parabolic (24db) grid antennas. That's not suitable for marine use of course, since those antennas have something like a 3 degree beam spread, so keeping them aligned would be a real bitch. But with 14db yagis, you'd be laughing. My conclusion is that this story is only significant because it shows how stupid the military folks are, not how innovative they are. A 700m ship-to-shore link can be done for cheap-as-free using bits from Best Buy (or my shelf). What they SHOULD have done was implemented a 128kbps VHF solution. For the kind of data they need to send, 128k is plenty, and the VHF is rugged, the signal is robust, the frequency is licensed, and the range is enormous. There's dozen (probably hundreds) of products that'll meet marine specs out there. Whatever.

The Canadian Military Uses This Too...

[VE3OGG]

Except theirs is modified with a high-powered, ultra-top secret Pringles can...

Re:The Canadian Military Uses This Too...

[mobby_6kl]

Canadian navy has ships that can take the additional weight of a pringles can?

Re:The Canadian Military Uses This Too...

[Runefox]

We just a couple of years ago bought (lease-to-own) a few state of the art diesel submarines from Great Britain circa 1990, with very few leaks. Due to their leak-free nature, Pringles cans are allowed on board to replace the excess water normally stored in the crew cabins, and the high-powered, top-secret nature of the new cans allow for internet connectivity at depths as low as two inches, nearing the maximum dive depth.

Yarrr

[42Penguins]

Only pirates are allowed to take part in "boarding operations on the high seas".
The Military can, however, "liberate" vessels.

Now you've done it.

[shmlco]

Now you've gone and done it. By publicizing the fact that they're using commercial off-the-shelf equipment you've opened the door to someone higher up mandating a "military-grade" system costing 100x as much.

This has been common for a long time

[zappepcs]

The military has much higher requirements for equipment. It wasn't until just recently that 'throw away' equipment became good enough for military use. By that I mean that the cost of replacement / repair became equivalent or parity. A cantenna and a $70 router can be replaced quickly without need for repairs... that is to say that the repair process is called replacement. This was never the case for military grade equipment in the past.

The advent of surface mount parts caused the cost of manufacture to drastically drop while the cost of repair soared. This doesn't work for armored vehicles, but for electronics it does.

You will notice other effects of 'modern warfare' also: the humble low-tech RPG has been a fiercely dangerous weapon. Very low-tech roadside bombs are rising in popularity too. While that has little to do with the cantenna and COTS 802.11g router, it does show that high dollar, high tech equipment is not always the best choice. If it works, well.. it works, and if people in the field find something that works, you will have trouble stopping them from using it.

I'm sure that the Pringles company are more than willing to keep shipping chips to the middle east.

Re:This has been common for a long time

[ScrewMaster]

This was never the case for military grade equipment in the past.

Not so. The military has long found that it is sometimes more efficient to simply discard malfunctioning equipment. Remember, cost is not so much an issue as availability. A radio that's out for repairs is unavailable, and the cost of that unavailability can be higher than the price tag of a brand new unit. Trained service technicians are not always on hand either, particularly under battlefield conditions.

My father was in the military a long time ago, and the techs he know would often just tag a piece of electronic equipment as "unrepairable" when the only thing wrong was something like a busted knob. That's because new equipment was readily available, tech time was expensive and limited and it just wasn't worth their time to try and fix it. They had more important things to do.

Re:Yawn

[DejaFu]

Bingo. No prob @ 500mw 2-way with antennas. Prob is: how do they get an 802.11 sig *back* from std xmit pwr w/o antenna @ 700 meters? I smell fish (fish = selling to bureaucrats). Here, fishy, fishy, fishy...

Re:Party Yachts

[ralewi1]

I believe you've missed the point on what EMIO (Expanded Maritime Interception Operations) involves and what this WI-FI communications system is used for - it's for boarding teams to relay information back to the mother ship, where specially trained sailors can use databases to help determine if there is a terrorist or smuggler on the boarded ship's crew. I understand that you're making an attempt at a cheap political joke, but this is serious, dangerous work, and it happens every day in the Gulf and other parts of the world.

TO ALL WHO RESPONDED

[PHAEDRU5]

I was making a smartass remark. Really.

I'll bet there's a Mil Std somewhere that requires the equipment to be resistant to everything from sea-salt to EMP. This adds cost. Probably for no actual good. However, as one of my commanders once told me "regulations are writen in blood."

$1400 may sound expensive, but what price on a life?

Re:$1400 probably covers cost for procurment.

[Runefox]

Cousin Timmy: OK, General, you're all set.

Gen: Thanks, son. Hey, why is it telling me that the connection strength is low?

Cousin Timmy: That's nothing to worry about. Also, you need to reconnect every ten minutes, because the router's a little weird, and I don't know how to flash the firmware. That's what the tech support forum said I should do.

Gen: ... What?

Cousin Timmy: Don't worry about that, there's nothing to the workaround. You just right-click on this icon here, click "repair" and you're done. Every ten minutes. Oh, and you won't get speeds over 1mbps, and your firewall won't let you share files. Also, your email sometimes doesn't work. It's a weird issue, I'm not in the mood to fix it.

Gen: Now wait a minute, I don't think-

Cousin Timmy: Like I said, everything's set up, and I've gotta get to class. Ciao!

a bit of history

[Arglebarf]

The initial work on this was done under the auspices an "off the shelf technology" program aboard USS Fletcher (DD 992) during work-ups and deployment in 2000, seeking to implement commercially available equipment in the tactical environment. This was a personal pet-project of one Capt. Noble, who went on to work at Defense Aqcuisitions at the Pentegon. The goal of the experiments then were to supplement the information broadcast over Link 11 systems with info from new-fangled digital cameras and personal GPS units. The difficulty then, and now, is that the system is standalone, i.e. the data broadcast over the wifi network is not immediately available to the battlegroup's common information systems. It must be copied from the communicating computer and manually copied to the ship's LAN. An example of this is the attempt to implement the wifi network on boarding support helicopters, which was halted upon realizing that the range was inadequate, it would require a fragile (by military standards) laptop aboard the aircraft, additional antennae would need to be mounted to the airframe, the aircraft's own datalink system combined with its own sensors often provided more tactically relevant information, and connectivity dropped out during any kind of maneuvering. This is not to say that there wasn't a need for the capability to transmit digital imagery to the on-scene commander, but the system as implemented suffered under the lack of integration with primary networks and the physical demands of boarding operations, usually carried out well beyond visual range of the mother ship, much less within reasonable wifi range.