Slashdot Mirror
$26 of Software Defeats American Military
reporter writes "A computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet can read and store the data transmitted on an unsecured channel by an unmanned drone. Drones are crucial to American military operations, for these aerial vehicles enable Washington to conduct war with a reduced number of soldiers. '... the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under US surveillance.'"
...you observe uav
Well, demodulating an unencrypted digital signal is not news.
I am more interested in what kind of RF equipment one would need to capture it off the air. ;)
It's not like you can do this with your WiFi card.
Don't tell the DoD. They've been paying $7,000 per license for that software.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We need an OSS option stat. Nobody should have to give up their software freedom just to make a mockery of America's finest tech toys.
The only question is, would this make more sense as an added option in wireshark, or GNU Radio?
Counting the cheapest part of the machine is silly.
Software is often free. $26 is a lot for software. The radio reception, etc. and knowing where to aim are all much more expensive and require skill.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Defeating them would be gaining control of the drones (a really scary proposition)
This seems to be an information leak.. something that ought to be fixable by using some sort of encryption.
Or even by making slight changes to the stream format, since SkyGrabber seems to just be off-the-shelf software.
So they recorded unencrypted OTA video feeds? While yes, they probably should have been encrypted in the first place and . . .
The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.
Yea that's kinda bad and lazy of them,
Senior military and intelligence officials said the U.S. was working to encrypt all of its drone video feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but said it wasn't yet clear if the problem had been completely resolved.
they're fixing it.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Perhaps the US can put an IP copyright on the data then sue anyone who looks at it without a licesnce! More money!
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
New in stock: The missile pack!
Buy your voucher now and for just 5.99 $, you'll get your chance to fire an onboard missile.
No hits guaranteed, maker cannot be held responsible for eventual damage. Offer valid for limited time only.
They're flying missions halfway around the world and not even bothering to encrypt the video stream. I can understand that in the rush to get drones in the field they might have had to cut a few corners on the system design -- but for crying out loud they've had 8 years to patch this hole. *Sigh* Your tax dollars at work.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
In the summer 2009 incident, the military found "days and days and hours and hours of proof" that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. "It is part of their kit now."
It's either pretty cheap or very easily stolen. I would thing they are using something off the shelf.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
...why in the world wasn't all the data feeds sent to & from a drone encrypted ALREADY? It took someone sniffing the wireless feed for someone to realize this?!
it is generally a bad idea to piss off people who have access to thermonuclear weapons and killer robots when I don't.
since this is /. I'll throw in a conspiracy theory + dumb meme: is the program really a CIA honeypot which just reports fake data? in the post 9/11 era, does your tracking software track you?
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Why did nobody slap AES or blowfish block ciphers around the video packets? I admit I am assuming the video is digital. There are inexpensive (in terms of the cost of a drone) silicon implementations of both for the planes and BSD licensed software for the stations. If they just used preshared keys its would have been trivial to do and probably would have prevented this.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I doubt a "terrorist" is the kind of person who would actually spend money on software. I know perfectly reasonable teenagers who access software for free all the time on this thing called the internet.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
The English text on the main SkyGrabber page could use some polishing. Is this from China?
Perhaps the smart play would be to quietly encrypt actual data, while continuing to broadcast placebo or manipulated data in the clear.
Honestly, what is the big deal?
FTA: '... the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under US surveillance.'"
An advantage? How? You know how the insurgents can figure out what roads and building are under US surveillance? It's the ones we keep flying drones over! I mean they can see the drones, they can hear the drones, they know what they're doing when the drones fly over them, they know the drones are taking video and pictures, and they should already have a pretty good idea what is in the video and pictures already.
Now if they somehow figured out how to tap into the cameras and have the drones relay video and pictures when they were flying back into base then I would say they've got an advantage, or if they tapped into actual satellite and spy plane footage.
Sure it's a bit stupid they didn't encrypt the actual feed but is the enemy getting any information they didn't know about already?
why didn't the DoD just start passing a fake feed from the drone? They could have added another encrypted channel for the real feed, which I would assume is trivial given the military's budget. Then pass fake data over the unencrypted channel. Sometimes disinformation to the enemy is far more valuable than real intelligence. I can see a bunch of jihadis sitting around watching a tv screen. "Look at those infidels. They are going to blow up the wrong building! Our secret base is 100 kilometers away! Say, does anyone else hear that noi..." [BOOM]
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
"U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds." The Germans did not think the Poles could break their codes. The Japanese did not think the US and the Australians would break their codes. The British did not think Argentina would finish assembling the Exocets on their own without the French manuals or use them in a way differently than designed. The Afghan and Iraqi insurgents have the money and the brains to break into Western weapon systems, don't underestimate them (or the probable help from Iran, Syria, Korea, etc...) The prospect of getting killed is a powerful motivator.
So they were able to intercept the unencrypted, a more important question is why weren't these communications encrypted?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
If the data feed coming _from_ the drone is cleartext, what about the commands being sent to it? TFA says there's "no evidence" that insurgents have been able to commandeer the drones yet, but doesn't say whether that's because the channel is secure, or that they just haven't reverse-engineered the protocol yet. O_o
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Not all religious zealots with huge bushy beards who fight in jihads and live in caves and don't use commercial software are terrorists.
Are you trying to lose the fucking war?
Best Slashdot Co
Yes, keep looking at the unencrypted channel playing a video loop of some clouds, while those watching the encrypted channel see the drone get closer and closer to you...
That's a great way to spread disinformation. Encrypt what you want to look at and don't encrypt what you want the enemy to see.
Whoever made this decision at General Atomics should be put up against the wall and shot. I assume it was management not wanting to get stuck with $100 bill of materials for a slightly faster CPU or DSP that can do realtime encryption, or by underbidding enough to get the contract only to cheap out and fuck it up.
Whoever accepted this for the military should be court-martialed, put up against a wall, and shot. Folks that stupid should be nowhere near technology. This is also likely some form of typical military graft, and at this point the folks involved probably have cushy General Atomics mob jobs.
We (the Allies we) cracked Enigma and Purple, and we get down to this.. It's not like uncrackable crypto isn't available FOR FREE, often designed by folks on the military payroll in some fashion years or decades ago.
Thanks, GA, for ruining my morning.
no kidding. That was my first reaction, too.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
Disinformation is a great attack.
Or they could subvert the drones, take them over, land them, and send them back in time to kill Washington's mother.
They'll be back.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Wide bandwidths, and ultimately covers just about everything from 100kHz to 3GHz. Transmit, receive, etc. Using this device, which costs about $1-2 thousand for a full kit and transmitter, you can listen to entire bands at once (the $750 unit handles 8MHz). These units have been used to create cell phone base stations.
Yum.
http://www.ettus.com/
SIG: HUP
So they recorded unencrypted OTA video feeds? While yes, they probably should have been encrypted in the first place and . . .
The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.
Yea that's kinda bad and lazy of them,
Senior military and intelligence officials said the U.S. was working to encrypt all of its drone video feeds from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but said it wasn't yet clear if the problem had been completely resolved.
they're fixing it.
#1: Someone once said "Assumption is the mother of all fuckups". My only hope is that this unencrypted intel is somehow time-sensitive enough that adversaries are getting their hands on it about 3 seconds before the target is destroyed, but I'm not going to "assume" that any operation or procedure is THAT efficient.
#2: "They're fixing it" is the worst fucking excuse I've ever heard for a problem that is over 15 years old. Don't sit here and try and convince me that crypto hardware(or software for that matter) is a foreign concept with military communications.
...is just a dvb-s grabber, see:
http://www.skygrabber.com/en/skygrabber.php
And all it does is intercept unencrypted IP packets from satellites which use IP over dvb-s for internet connections (most of them are one-way connections, uplink via pots modem/isdn).
So this is _definitly_ _NOT_ "spying on drones", I highly doubt that the drones themselves have an dvb-s transmitter in the same frequency range as "public" communication sats. It _might_ be that some of the drone data was/is routed through the internet and therefore could be intercepted with above software _IF_ some military dudes use any of the commercial ip-via-sat-providers (or even their _unencrypted_ own), but this isn't different from normal ethernet/wifi/whatever carrier ist used - sniffing.
Oh and btw., open source terrorists get their awsome drone sniffing software for FREE!!!!1111:
http://sites.google.com/site/skynetr32/skynet.%3Ar32_index_en (in case you're to lazy to klick on the link: basically another dvb-s file sniffer, but open sauce).
Is there any real security risk in this? I suspect it is very small. The Russians never bothered to encrypt the telemetry on their ICBM tests, because after all even assuming someone was reading it, they had no way of stopping the thing. Even if you know where the drone is, it is going to be very hard to shoot down; RPGs and IEDs really aren't much use. And given that this is a video feed, how do you ray trace back to the actual position of the camera?
Unfortunately there are plenty of assholes out there who will exaggerate anything in order to claim that they are more security conscious than the next person (and perhaps hope to get a contract for their company). But this is surely small war, no-one dead, move along please.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
furthermore, there's nothing to say they still can't do that, or aren't actually doing that already. in fact, a big story in the international press about how dumb the military is on these video feeds is a good cover. one can hope, anyways, that the military is smarter than depicted in this story
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Finally, a case where the DMCA and anti-piracy laws COULD actually improve national security!
Of course, trying to serve terrorists with DMCA DRM circumvention notices could be even more pointless than sending them to The Pirate Bay...
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
Sensationalist... i would expect this from a tabloid.
Title should have been: Unencrypted data broadcasted everywhere ... can be received by anyone!
The leap from that to "$26 of Software Defeats American Military" is quite a big leap in my opinion.
Sigs are for the weak.
how about encrypting the downlink DOH!
UAVs are to detect hostiles, observe movements (spying if you will) and perhaps engage them. You can't really use the UAV information to kill the ones benefiting from it -- unless someone is stupid enough to observe/admire their own camp from an UAV, which at wartime sounds pretty stupid. As an opposing force member you could see yourself in it's video feed, or gain information that you are not. That information can however be gained other ways too; for example:
Information sent by this UAV becomes a problem if it's decode able by the opposing forces while it's landing to or taking off from the airforce base. Then again, there cannot be too much to learn from there. As an opposing force member you most likely already have information (googled up perhaps) about their airforce base, the kind of security they have behind their lines. If someone was decoding your UAV transmissions to learn about your airbase, you'll most likely been already compromised as they ought to be in the visual range as well.
Of course this is mostly from army point of view, intelligence gathering can't be stupid enough transmitting anything unencrypted/unobfuscated.
From TFA:
The difficulty, officials said, is that adding encryption to a network that is more than a decade old involves more than placing a new piece of equipment on individual drones. Instead, many components of the network linking the drones to their operators in the U.S., Afghanistan or Pakistan have to be upgraded to handle the changes.
As an engineer in the defense industry and with experience integrating communication systems, I can't even think of one military data radio system in use that doesn't have encryption ability. Even if they are using off-the-shelf wifi (doubtful) they wouldn't need to change hardware to at least have some encryption. Either this quote is a lie, or someone did something monumentally stupid.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
"Hey I can see my house from here! Oh Wai..."
Damn straight. There's Free Software that can do it!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not to be harsh about it, but think back to high school and college and ask yourself if you would describe the people who were planning military careers as the "best and brightest" of your class.
Ahh, you are thinking of the one or two guys who were all gung ho but not especially bright and had delusions about being a badass commando. Yeah, my school had some too. See the thing is though that those guys aren't the guys running the military. The guys you are thinking of end up as infantry grunts or something similar and exit the service after a few years. I have a cousin who is one of those guys. Smart but classic ADHD and socially stunted and not someone I'd trust right now to be in charge of anything. But he served two tours in Iraq and now he's in college so I have hope for him.
The guys in the officer corps (commissioned and higher level NCO) are almost invariably bright and hard working and most of them that I've ever met didn't talk much about their interest in the military. I have a classmate who is a major in the US Navy who never gave the slightest hint he was interested in a military career. He was quiet, very smart, and I would have guessed he'd be an engineer but instead he's become a heck of a good officer. I have a number of friends who were graduates of West Point and Annapolis and I've been impressed as hell by each one of them. Smart, incredibly disciplined, and I'd hire any one of them in a heartbeat.
The US military is an incredibly complicated and large organization with huge budgets, difficult goals, and a huge workforce. If you think managing all that is easy and doesn't require tremendous skill, you are delusional. Sure they make mistakes just like any other large organization but their mission is also more complicated than most and if they fail, people die.
No more words needed.
...and ground control is NOT ENCRYPTED? That's simply unbelievable. I'm speechless.
The software's website (http://www.skygrabber.com/) is down, probably due to news DDoS (aka Slashdotted), blocking people's access to the program.
What is this called? Reverse Streisand Effect?
I read the FA and thinking back to the state of computers around the time of the Bosnian conflict, and presuming that the military lags behind several generations of technology until it's proven rock-solid, maybe the guys at the company realized that encrypting the signal was a drag on the real time performance that is presumably absolutely-positively crucial to this sort of environment; any lag and your drone is not where you think it is, and your firepower is concentrated not on the bad guys in the small truck, but the bus carrying the puppies and kittens. Plus, back then, who would have thought laptops and other computer tech would be so popular that even irregulars would be using them?
Of course, this is no excuse for the company to not keep up with the tech...they probably figured that it had worked so well for so long that there simply wasn't a need to change things around.
If only one person bought it, to use it for that purpose, you can bet it’s out there on the file sharing networks, free to download. :D
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
$26 software defeats American military? OMG, we've been beaten?
Oh, wait... you're just saying that insurgents have a tactical advantage in some missions because they've exploited a security vulnerability using $26 software. So maybe $26 software used as weapon aganist US military?
Ah... but the military discovered the problem in the field, and is working to plug the security hole. $26 software annoys American military temporarily.
...never works. This has been known for nearly two decades (TFA): "The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said."
I find it hard to believe these big-budget, high-tech killing machines don't use RSA (or hell, OTP!) encryption with every transmission. More likely, this is a decoy transmission designed to mislead the enemy.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Why not use the Drones as a way to help folks? Afghanistan does not need an Aggressor Sniper Team for every flat tire problem. How about applications like Snow Fall Levels? Lake Levels? Traffic? Crop Pests? River and Lake Levels? Civil Engineering Project Completions? Sometimes just walking up to the person and saying, "Would you please stop flipping off the Reapers as they fly by. To Americans it means 'I going to empty my bladder'."
Hacking makes systems more resistant and secure over time. It's a lot like biological systems that develop immunity to infection over time.
Satellite TV is remarkably resistant to hacking and theft due to its long and tumultuous evolution driven by hackers.
Hopefully military communications will evolve as fast now that the rest of the world is becoming technologically adept.
-ted
You'd think the DOD would be interested in hiring more people with a background in IT ..
Yes, and some linux geek on slashdot has *all* the information and has studied the situation more than the folks who do it for a living. Right. Go back to your room, kid, and watch more movies.
I recall watching a system get installed that was running Windows NT...in 2005. Reason it could not be upgraded was that by the time it went through all its "security certifications" and QA testing, there was no flexibility to upgrade, because it met the basic requirements for its purpose. Unfortunately, 4 years later, it is still in use and unable to be upgraded as the company probably moved off to its next government contract and the support for it is very limited.
Obviously they don't think it's a big issue. And they're right. What's the worst case scenario here?
Last words overheard from an Al Qaeda satellite-intercept house: "Hey, look, I'm on TV!"
It's just the video feed, moron.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Yes, using a one-way hash on the video feed is the solution...
Brilliant!
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
That's OUTRAGEOUS! torrent pl0x!
the targets are still rather unsophisticated. Theres lots of latent security in the system should the need arise.
Now that the WSJ is a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece, it is a tabloid.
Oh, they could, but how would they decrypt it?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
A coworker sent me a link to the same story on Fox news, and the title of that one was "Iranian-Backed Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones."
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Grandma's get intrigued by these types of tabloids.
A computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet
...they probably downloaded it from pirate bay.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said"
They know about it and didn't fix it then? That should have been one of the first questions asked when they were developed. Is all sensitive data encrypted? Yes video is very sensitive data. Just that fact that they know what the military is looking at is sensitive data in itself.
From my own experience with these kinds of systems, it's very likely that, during telemetering, the stream can become corrupted to a point where the ECC will fail. So then the question becomes, what do you do when the ECC doesn't work (making it impossible to decrypt)? Drop the frame? Retransmit? Neither of these choices are very good. The "easiest" thing to do is just send unencrypted and handle the funkified data payloads as the come in.
More importantly, these video stream are sent over comms links that have a finite bandwidth. Encryption and ECC are essentially "anti-compression" techniques that ultimately require much wider comms bandwidth for the same data payload throughput (e.g. frame rate). It's possible that a trade off was made preferring higher data throughput over a relatively narrow comms pipe -- at the expense of security of the stream.
It's a kind of Sophie's Choice tradeoff, but that's what Engineering is all about.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Quite possibly the contractor said, "the data signal is unencrypted, but we can add encryption for another $2M." The US DOD said, "who'll know it isn't encrypted unless we tell them? That fact is now classified TOP SECRET, press on as is."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINCGARS SINCGARS uses 25 kHz channels Seems a bit low bandwith for good video.
I don't understand, this should be a good thing...
I kill those DirkaDirka bastards all the time when they are staring at laptops, so I can call another UAV. I mean seriously, how else am I gonna to the Tactical Nuke...
~Mekkah
I am not a graphics expert and so am probably off base here, but can't one take a still from the video feed and ray trace back to the camera? If so could they not do this repeatedly to determine reasonably close to the camera's actual position?
Why would they even need ray tracing if they have the live feed and multiple competent sets of eyeballs? I am not a pilot either, but I can certainly recognize the general areas of my home region from the traffic congestion video feeds from the rush hour helicopters. (Well I could before they stopped flying thanks to high fuel costs and low crowd source costs for traffic reporting!) Are we to assume they are not capable of this?
I agree. I expect better from Slashdot, but they seemed to have turned their headline writing over to the DrudeReport.
What they don't say is that this report going back to January of this year, and that the military has been working on fixing the problem since then. They "hackers" can only pick up the video signal, not other info, and could not control the drones, which is what is implied from the headline.
I do think it is embarrassing and kind of hard to imagine that you couldn't see this coming, especially with North Korea regularly developing and selling anti-US technologies. This should have been in the design, or at least identified as a risk.
Also simply not true since the communication channels ARE ENCRYPTED.
1) Spread rumors that cheap software can defeat Predator drones.
2) Offer software for sale on the internet.
3) Include tracking device with every copy of software sold.
4) Trace every shipment to it's destination.
5) Send Predator drone to attack destination.
Yep, sounds like a winning plan to me!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
that's quite worrisome. I really hope that they only receive encrypted data or, at the very, very least, need some sort of secure authentication that can't be easily falsified. If you could transmit to the drones with $30 software and have them listen, I would be absolutely terrified.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
That video is copyright! It's piracy! The government must issue Al Qaeda with a DMCA takedown notice immediately!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Also simply not true since the communication channels ARE ENCRYPTED.
And - seriously - you know this how?
I certainly hope you're right!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
The Germans had great confidence in ENIGMA as well. But, the Allies could read it and it made us look stupid. Granted, cracking some of the current Allied codes would require a fundamental breakthrough in computing - like a proof that P=NP and the utility to solve these problems, but...
What if the Chinese had it?
We would be screwed.
This is my sig.
Not just where we are looking and when. But what the capabilities of our systems are.
If they know what we are looking at, they know which of their assets are at risk. If they can get an idea of how well we can see, they can try out different methods of camouflaging them.
Have gnu, will travel.
For example, the general that was recently in charge of the operations in Iraq would be Dr. David Petraeus. He got his PhD from Princeton in International Relations. You discover that most military leaders have at least an undergraduate degree, and many have advanced degrees so even in the traditional academic sense they are smart and educated.
The military is plenty happy to accept those that aren't all that bright as low level grunts. After all, the job is generally "Do precisely what you are told and don't ask questions." For that, intellect is not required in great levels. However the same is NOT true in the command structure. They want people that can think.
This is also why you find that quite often someone either starts and stays as a non-officer or starts as an officer. While there certainly are people who get promoted all the way up through the ranks, you find that the vast majority of officers went to university and to something like ROTC, and then got commissioned directly as a second lieutenant (or equivalent in other branches). They want smart, educated, people as officers.
Just goes to show you that the misunderstanding of technology is pretty much ubiquitous outside the tech community.
Although FNC gets points for at least being slightly lower on the hyperbole scale, and somewhat more accurate in their story title than pretty much everywhere else I've seen this story.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The military is plenty happy to accept those that aren't all that bright as low level grunts.
They take them because they have a manpower quota to fill. However all things being equal the military would prefer soldiers who are more intelligent over those who are less so. Smart soldiers are easier to train, can tackle more difficult problems, report back better information, and give you an advantage over less intelligent opponents. As long as they still follow orders, a smarter soldier is generally a better soldier.
Problem is that when you need that many people, not all of them are going to be above average and as you pointed out, some jobs require less thinking than others. The military makes them take IQ tests and those that aren't so bright aren't given the thought heavy jobs.
The technical details are trivial and not really the story. The issue is that we are broadcasting real time battlefield info to our opponents.
Think of it as having someone photocopy 50% of all espionage (spy) reports and then faxing them to every foreign power. To use a Civil War (US) reference, it would be the equivalent of having the Confederate army cavalry give copies of their reports to the Union army.
What is the D.o.D. response to this? "We didn't think they would find out..." (paraphrased)
Hmm, so that realistic bombing game app I bought for my Droid was really killing people in Afghanistan? Thank god I didn't spend my points on the Thermonuclear upgrade.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
nt
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
I'm trying to understand how you can justify this.
We don't need to make excuses for the military. They don't need that kind of "support." They need a clear-eyed assessment of the consequences of our aerial surveillance videos falling into the hands of the enemy. They need accountability and better decision-making in the future.
If I could watch these videos, shot from drones over the terrain I lived and grew up in, I could avoid rocket attacks; eventually, with enough study, even predict the habits and patterns of drone deployment altogether.
If you think this is not a big deal, imagine if our enemies had unencrypted video broadcasting from their planes (if they had any), or their trucks, or their persons. Could we find no way to exploit this? Really?
From an engineering perspective, this is unquestionably a massive embarrassment for the US military. If you had come on slashdot yesterday and argued that any part of the data stream from these drones was unencrypted, you would have been laughed out of the metaphorical room. Even with the WSJ covering the story, it is hard to believe. Then again, they're a Murdoch paper now. Who knows.
If this story is true, it's a mistake so severe that it hurts our credibility and stature and emboldens our enemies. If our (very expensive) drone effort was comrpomised, there were very likely missed opportunities to hit targets, and an indirect cost in the lives of American troops. That's not complicated reasoning. It's obvious.
The justification is if it was a net win - in other words, the compromised drones were all we could field in time, and they were more effective than no drones. But the article rules that out. No one here will believe that with 10+ years and the world's largest budgets, America really lacked the ability to encrypt this video stream.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Informative would be that statement, with a source to back it up.
Or, would I be equally informative if I just replied "No, the top pilot is actually a kitten, and he flys the drone by batting at a special controller that's been dipped in catnip and dangled in front of him on a string"? My story is way better, and I don't have a source either.....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
Its a ploy to make people spend $26, see who buys it, monitor their ip address, monitor all their other purchases on their credit card, etc.
Maybe they're purposefully sending incorrect video feeds unencrypted
Yep. First thing I thought of. How many times has this old trick been used on Star Trek? I, for one, have lost count.
I think the Allies did a little of this in WWII also.
I sure hope there aren't any insurgents reading this....
Uh oh... O crap...
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
Yeah, but the battlefield info is a picture of them getting blown up.
To use a Civil War (US) reference, it would be the equivalent of having the Confederate army cavalry give copies of their reports to the Union army.
No, it would be the equivalent of the Confederates giving General Grant a picture of himself.
Now that the WSJ is a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece, it is a tabloid
No, it isn't. It's a broadsheet.
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
You socialist! How dare you government run military is best! We all KNOW that the free market attracts the best and brightest producing more for less while bringing up the stock market!
The only problem is Bush didn't have enough time to continue privatizing the military and CIA; once we hand over everything to the market they will protect us competently. The banks, enron, madoff, GM, ceo pay, were all caused by government socialist intervention! We need less regulation! Let their lobbyists compete for contracts - hell, let the lobbyists vote for us! They already control what they want why restrain them further? If we hand government over to the corporations they don't be hurt and cause all these problems because of the socialists!
Welcome to America-- home of the multinational super-human corporations and an embarrassingly ignorant and complacent consumers. ;-)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Imagine how this so-called flaw can be exploited. The Power of Disinformation Send the unencrypted drones on jolly little excursions looking at non-targets. Then use the encrypted drones to gather your proper intel. Use the old-style to distract, confuse, confound and deceive your enemy. Then
No, it is a tabloid (2) , smartass.
To be a pedant, the video seems most assuredly to be a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government and therefore in the public domain upon creation. See 17 USC 105. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/105.html
This man speaks truth. If a USAF officer ever wants to make it past Captain, having a master's degree is virtually required. In addition, there are about four mandatory professional development classes between Second Lieutenant and Brigadier General.
Over on the enlisted side, I forget the exact stats, but I believe something like 40-50% of the USAF's Technical Sergeants (about halfway through the enlisted rank structure) have at least a bachelor's degree. A lot of senior NCOs have master's degrees, and some ever have doctorate degrees. They also have their own professional development courses that they have to go through in order to progress.
Claiming the military is composed entirely of "dumb grunts" is a rather ignorant thing to say.
Even if you can't decrypt the signal, just knowing its there could tell you that a drone is nearby....
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
The Soviet military lacked a consistent record keeping system. A supply unit created one using the Russian Apple II clone and AppleWorks 1.2. It worked so well that AppleWorks 1/3 was hacked to support the Cyrillic font in the clone. Eventully the Sovient military became the #1 pirate of AppleWorks world wide.
The Soviets had thousands of thermonuclear weapons as did the US. Had one side used them, the other would also. The combined megatonnage could have sterilized the Earth's crust over a meter down. All higher life would have perished either immediately or in a cascade of die-offs.
This post is a direct challanger to the summary post for being both true in substance and best use of hyperbole and non-use of tense in order to put together a marginally interesting article with an absolutely untrue title to draw people in, and dumpt them nearly flat out after providing a tiny bit of information.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Except it is not. It is the entire video of all surveillance of hundreds of drones as they take off, fly THROUGH US army bases, patrol a vast area of territory, then return THROUGH the US army base. The video includes positions of US troops on base, images of US equipment and defense positions. It also includes all pictures of US troops on the ground where ever the drones fly over.
You are right though, it would be like the Confederates giving General Grant pictures. But it would be pictures of everything from leaving the Confederate encampment to there objective (which since many of these are non-attack recon drones is all over the place) and back to the encampment.
The only thing lessons this issue is that to get the data, you have to be in broadcast range and looking.
I also should say that I do take this one a bit personally. My best friend is a UAV crew chief currently stationed in Iraq. When you have a conversation with someone who says, "It was kind of scary to find out that the guys we just captured out side of the base, had pictures from my UAV of ME on it," you might start taking this a bit more seriously.
Rotary wing is much harder to fly than fixed wing. They are dynamically unstable and dont glide well (at all).
Learn what you are talking about or STFU.
Obviously they don't think it's a big issue. And they're right. What's the worst case scenario here?
The worst case scenario is that the drone is a reconnaissance drone used to identify enemy positions during an engagement, but showing positions of allied troops in its video feed as well (I would imagine, given how high it flies, it wouldn't be uncommon to get such a "big picture"). If the enemy taps into said video feed, he now has information about the position and movement of your individual troops as well, and as a defender, it may well be able to use that information more effectively.
Even outside direct engagements, consider if they're able to tap into the feed when the drone leaves its base of operations (I assume it's live all the time) - this would give a live view into the base. I wonder how useful that can potentially be for, say, accurate mortar fire intended to take out specific assets, or inflict maximum possible damage to people within...
Well to keep with the unix philisophy of small reusable components the following should be done:
[8 bullet items deleted]
And just as with any other aircraft-related project, when the weight of the documentation exceeds the weight of the aircraft it will be ready to fly.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Plenty of people on this site have been there, done that and know how much it costs.
Assuming that Murdoch's rag isn't lying about the story (a point that's been made and worth considering), those of us who both do comms security and have worked with profit-oriented military contractors, know all too well that there are too many times when incompetence is the rule not the exception.
Unless they can intercept and alter the signal, they're still going to get blown up. It's just their commanders (or subordinates if a UAV strikes a HQ) can do a real post mortem on why "UAVs" > "sticks and stones".
And in TFA, it's a video feed. Video feeds are not use in command and control of UAV--but instead target verification and post analysis--which is useless intel to an adversary during a unfolding mission. Also, you know if they encrypt it, they need more processing power. If an unencrypted stream barely provides real-time, low-latency video through a satellite network (thousands of miles wirelessly), and moving at a few hundred miles an hour, adding encryption will surely kill the performance and add a boat load of latency on the vehicle side...
Is this a surprise to non-military, web-programmers, h*ll yes. But to the milspec programmer I can see there was a bunch of technical tradeoffs involved in going 'unencrypted'.
And sure, you probably could get wireshark sniffing packets off their connection...for FREE.
What is truly depressing is that Americans didn't learn a damn thing from their own mistakes in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and the mistakes of all the Empires past: ...
Trust me: Lots (the bulk) of Americans learned the lessons just fine. And we're well aware of Afghanistan's nickname: The Graveyard of Empires.
Unfortunately, our ruling class still thinks it can use the war as an excuse to expand its own power and wealth (at far greater cost to the rest of the nation). They don't yet believe they've come to the point that the damage will exceed the profit in THEIR cases and that it's thus time to pull the plug.
What's happening now is that the factions of the bulk of the American population are realizing the ruling class has finally cut the government off from the population's control and is pushing it into a runaway failure mode. So they're organizing to attempt to bring said ruling class to heel (in the hopes of heading off the need for more drastic solutions, with their higher costs and still greater risks in case of failure).
Thus the excitement at the town-hall meetings. And thus the two flavors of the Tea Party movement - coming out of the Libertarian / Paulite and the Paleo-conservative factions - and the recent overtures from the anti-war factions of the left wing for an alliance with them.
Interesting times.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This has very little to do with UAVs, or whether old ones have the capability to encrypt, etc.
This has to do with the fact that there are far more receivers in the field than UAVs, or other transmitters. And those receivers cannot decrypt, so everything in the arsenal that wants to transmit to these ROVER portable receiver units has to do it unencrypted.
http://www.defence.pk/forums/military-aviation/41782-insurgents-hack-u-s-drones-3.html