Slashdot Mirror
Iranian TV Shows Downed US Drone
First time accepted submitter loic_2003 writes "Iranian TV has broadcast footage of an advanced U.S. drone aircraft that Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls. The BBC's James Reynolds watched the footage and said the fact that the drone appeared undamaged provided some evidence to support Tehran's version of events. The film was captioned 'RQ170 — advanced U.S. spy plane' and carried on the Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 channel."
My recollection is that it was only the video feed returned from the drone that was unencrypted. The control signals sent to the aircraft were still encrypted. Even signal jamming is apparently a difficult way to disable the drone because it has a degree of autonomy.
If Iran's claims are true (that it gained control of the plane) then that is either quite an achievement on their part, or quite a failure on the part of the US engineers.
Evidently you think American engineers are idiots. The frequency hopping patterns for drone communications are produced by a cryptographically-secure random number generator with a pre-negotiated seed. Snoop it all you like; this isn't your neighbor with unsecured wifi, it's your neighbor with AES512 and a fifty-word passphrase surfing over a VPN tunnel.
No. This is exactly your neighbor with unsecured wifi.
From the wall street journal, Dec 17, 2009.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html
"Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter."
Hate to break it to you buy the Predator and first run Reaper drones have completely unencrypted communications links, the com links on later drones might actually be up to snuff but there's no guarantee of that since they aren't public. The drones with unencrypted communications are still in the field since they're too valuable to pull for an overhaul.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't think what that video showed was an American Spy drone.
It looked more like a garage kit-bashed fiberglass ooh that would be cool concept of a drone. Lets see, first the shape. It's a flying wing, and what the heck are those large things standing up on the back like that? It's completely different than anything I've ever seen on any flying wing design before. I'm not a plane expert by any imagination, but still, it looks like something a George Lucas wannabe would build, not the military.
It's totally the wrong color, honestly, nothing the military makes is that color, and there's reasons for it. If it was really a spy drone, it would most likely be radar absorbent black. By the way, the SR71 was NEVER flat black when they were in use, it was a special radar absorbent black paint that is still top secret.
The drone is called the Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel, AKA "The Beast of Kandahar" after photographs of the thing were snapped at an airfield in Kandahar. Those photos show a fat flying wing, painted a light color, with a pair of distinctive bulges over the "shoulders" of the wings, and a covered inlet above the nose. What the Iranians showed is an RQ-170- or else a decent copy. It is hard to believe the drone came down in one piece, which raises the possibility that this is a fake. It's not clear why they would present a fake, however. The only reason I can imagine is that there just wasn't enough left of the drone to put on TV- perhaps it came down hard and fast and broke into hundreds of little scraps, or perhaps the fuel caught fire and burned up the crash. However, if it's *not* the real drone, the guys who built it should be able to tell, and you would expect the U.S. to come right out and say so.