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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."
There is nothing more dangerous to a drone than a TV show.
They have anti-aircraft TV shows? We're screwed.
...then I took an arrow to the knee
...someone stole your sweetroll.
I seem to recall reading that the communications to the drones are largely unencrypted for some unknown reason, so if that's the case, I could see someone overriding the controls and bringing down the plane.
It seems very unlikely that an uncontrolled aircraft would come down in one piece, yet the US claims that the drone in Iran's possession is one they lost control and track of. The idea that the US could lose track of a piece of technology that size with all their spy satellites and spy planes doesn't seem very likely to me, further lending credence to Iran's story.
Methinks the US may have been caught red-handed spying on Iran. It's not a surprise that they would be doing so, but it is very surprising that they've been sloppy enough to get caught.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Captured US Drone Destroyed By US Drone Strike in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Breaking News: Iran now in possession of two US drones, a spy drone and a predator drone...
They probably forgot to put a password on PHPMyAdmin.
Honestly a drone takeover requires you to be above it. They get control from satellites and AWAC's that are flying ABOVE Them. they do not get controls from ground based transmitters. Plus how did they get their hands on the C&C protocols?
IF they did this, then the USA military electronics is a complete and utter joke. But right now I'm claiming that it glided into the sandy wasteland after it had a failure and they found it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just FYI, most other reports are saying that the United States acknowledges this the only incredulity surrounds how the drone went down -- not whether it was there or not. US says technical malfunction. Iran says Allah helped them hack it and control it themselves.
My work here is dung.
They used plan B in order to allow the Chinese to use plan A.
Despite extensive covering on the underside, to me it looks TOO fresh and undamaged. It doesn't look used at all
I think this is a mold reproduction of whatever they did get, faired out the damaged areas, swapped over a few parts and the paint is is still wet. There is nothing underneath it, its just a surface shell that looks right.
Just like the CIA changed its story, you mean? "Drone, what drone?" to "It's possible we've lost one in Afghanistan, but no one took it down" to "Yeah, it's probably ours. But it didn't enter their airspace" to "Well, it might have strayed accidentally into their airspace." At some point in the future, when all is said and declassified, I'm sure we'll learn it was on a spy mission in the middle of Iran.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The propaganda they'll get out of taking down one of the mighty U.S. spy drones (and establishing that they ARE, in fact, being spied on by the U.S.) is WAY more valuable to the regime there than any stealth tech they'll get out of it. And they'll still get that tech anyway. It's not like they're not going to tear it apart when the press conferences are all over.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If by "offend," you mean "possibly start a fucking war by sending U.S. troops into Iran, all for the sake of a lousy drone" then yes.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What you call "offend" would more commonly be understood as war. I'm going to guess it was the President's decision not to engage in a war against Iran.
"Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls" Hey now. Espionage and sabotage are one thing, but that might be a DMCA violation!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Wouldn't you expect that n hours after failing to receive commands, and if no coded 'safe' key input, a self-destruct system would trip in? Check that thing for ticking, guys; remember HMS Campbeltown!
It shouldn't be too difficult for them to take apart. The construction was probably outsourced, so the Chinese technical agents built it in the first place.
Maybe Iranian TV will show us a peak at the "Made in ....." label?
Those American flags don't convince me . . . I didn't see any pirate skulls on the American flags at the last Olympics . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
When this story first broke, it was cited as response to an American act of aggression. Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land. At the very least, the latter seems to me to be something that you'd have to be well prepared to do, in advance. So perhaps the drone was deliberately encroaching on Iranian airspace, but they must have been patiently waiting for their opportunity to pounce.
It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan, and Iran sent radio waves across the border to make the intercept. That's unknown. But by pateience and pouncing or by cross-border override, in either case it seems to me that they've given up the right to shriek in righteous indignation about being violated. The proper response to "Oh No!! Our airspace is being violated!!" would have been to shoot the thing down. There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
But right now I'm claiming that it glided into the sandy wasteland after it had a failure and they found it.
For a recon platform, that's a pretty crappy fail safe mode.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Lets see here. We're waging robo war in Pakistan, Afganistan, Iraq Yemen - virtually surrounded their whole country - some 100K troops near their borders. ...and if I understand you, you're complaining that the Iranians used some props you find offensive.
We're beating the drums of "Those Iranians are the worst since Hitler..."
We're probably assassinating their scientists.
We've invaded multiple countries without provocation for a long time, and waged countless covert wars and actions against those we don't like.
We supported a proxy war [using our best friend Saddam Hussain - (where have I heard that name before?)] using weapons of mass destruction against the Iranians, using US intelligence.
And less than sixty years ago we helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran and put in place the Shah. [Who was evil in ways that Hitler *would* understand.]
You sir, have a most misplaced sense of decency [or a most woefully inadequate knowledge of the history of the dealings of your country].
Of all the offenses betwixt the USA and Iran, I'd posit that the balance isn't even close to parity. The Iranians have a lot of IOU's due against the US. [Like enough to use one every day for a century.]
Clearly the solution is to have the planes fly autonomously, so if the signal from the remote control is broken, the onboard AI can move and deploy weapons at its own discretion.
There's a lot more to jamming than that. Unless your transmitter is absurdly more powerful than the one you're trying to jam out, spread spectrum transmissions can be extremely difficult to jam. The receiver is looking for (simplified here) modulation in a signal pattern. If you know the exact pattern you are looking for, you can very effectively filter out the noise. Then you just demodulate the signal to get your information out clean.
So when brute force isn't going to cut it, you have to really know what you're trying to jam, and more than likely you are going to have to be able to adapt, because critical control systems like this will have multiple fail-over procedures in place to automatically hop to a different band, modulation, whatever they care to mix up to render your jamming ineffective.
Providing a very simple example of why brute force doesn't work: get a whistle, and some really loud speakers and stereo. Have a friend stand by the speaker, occasionally blowing the whistle (maybe in a coded pattern that provides you with information), while the stereo cranks out the sound at ear-splitting levels. Standing 300 feet away, can you hear when the whistle blows? No you can't, the music is jamming you. Now get out a little handheld mic with headphones, and $15 in radio shack hardware for making a notch filter, tuned to the frequency of the whistle. Listen to that. You may hear a very faint trace of the music, but the whistle will be loud and clear every time its blown. Jamming is overcome. Doesn't really matter if you crank up the volume on the music either. Now what if the music happens to hit the note of the whistle and plays a solid or repeating tone at that frequency? So you start hearing that and can't tell when its the whistle or the music. Now your friend can see you waving your arms around indicating you can't hear him, so he puts that whistle in his pocket and takes out a different whistle. You flip a switch on your gear to switch the notch frequency for the next whistle. Now you're back in business. That's how jamming works, brute force often is ineffective.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Roughly the same cost as an F-15. Cheaper than an F-22 (around 200 million a pop depending on how you count things) and about what a hit movie brings in on midnight showings. (Just for some perspective).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
What battlefield advantage? Anything they MIGHT have will be wiped out by B2 stealth bombers before any other shots are fired.
If anything, Iran gets to wave this at the Security Council (china and russia are pals with veto power) when the US wants to "librate" them. Nukes or not, Iran has not attacked the US or Israel directly, or violated any airspace under their operation. The US can't exactly say the same, can they.
Iran is not going to make the same mistake playing chicken with the US like Iraq did. Israel has already played our hand with the unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear development (pissing off China and Russia)
Their goal is to talk smack to get Israel to keep stepping over the line... They are not attacking anybody right now.... Playing "fair" is not the same as violating international law and Iran is playing very carefully.
The revolution failed.
The US military is pulling out of Iraq.
The propaganda "Iran is a terrorist" is ramping up. Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iran.
UN resolutions to fill the requisite paperwork so it's all "legal".
Economic sanctions on major exports.
There have been softening up attacks on the defences and other strategic targets.
All that's left to do really is have some "event" which will be seen as an act of war on the part of Iran as justification. Some Arch Duke Ferdinand.
Deleted
And they'll still get that tech anyway
Eventually, but remember that to get Stealth you need to have researched Combustion and Lasers. You don't get it automatically any more.
Wait, were we talking about something else?
"95% of all Slashdot
You are describing signal jamming tech (single-channel, sine-wave) that is decades old.
Modern EW platforms are capable of covering entire RF bands, adapting and following hopping schemes, and efficiently spreading their energy over seemingly pseudo-random code-schemes.
In the end, there's only so much you can do with modulation techniques - it comes down to signal strength - and the inverse-square-law pretty much says that who-ever gets closer wins.
The control signal from the US base comes likely via LEO sat-link or over-the-horizon AWACS-type platform - both of which are going to be hundreds of kilometers away. You're not going to need "absurdly more powerful" anything to interfere with that. I have a wide-band I/Q generator able to modulate any mathematically describable code-sheme - which I could then hook up to our MIL-STD-461 susceptibility testing-chamber-amp - and knowing something about the signal band I could easily get the right high-gain antenna to track the bastard off the sky... and all this is with off-the-shelf COTS equipment!
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
And less than sixty years ago we helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran and put in place the Shah. [Who was evil in ways that Hitler *would* understand.] ...and if I understand you, you're complaining that the Iranians used some props you find offensive.
Not to mention the minor fact that Allan Dulles bragged left and right about the CIA hand in the overthrow to the point where every kid in Iran knew the score ...
TCAP-Abort
With frequency hopped spread spectrum, even if some of the hop frequencies are jammed, the transmitted symbols will not necessarily be because they can be spread over multiple hops. It does not have to be a transmitter that dwells on a single frequency long enough to send some information. A single symbol can be spread over multiple hops.
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
— Otto von Bismarck
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Remember this story from back in October?
Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
Ever since I read Iran claimed they didn't shoot it down, I've been wondering if or how much that virus and this "cyber warfare" attack might be connected...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
The aircraft shown on Iranian television today was not the American stealth drone that crashed in Iran last week, as the Iranian government claimed, but was likely just a model, U.S. officials told ABC News.
Minutes after a Pentagon spokesperson said that military personnel and others were examining the footage broadcast today of what appeared to be an undamaged stealth RQ-170 Sentinel, multiple U.S. officials said that based on inconsistencies with the design of the drone, along with clues from imagery of the actual drone's crash site, the drone shown was not the Sentinel. U.S. officials previously confirmed that an RQ-170 did, in fact, crash land somewhere in Iran.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-rq-170-sentinel-stealth-drone-shown-iran/story?id=15115781#.TuEsofJbeV0
It works *nothing* like an R/C model, aside from the fact that radio signals are somehow involved. R/C models are flown "by hand", i.e. the pilots manipulate the elevator/ailerons/throttle etc directly. The drones are almost entirely flown by the on-board autopilot, flight management computer, and inertial navigation. These are indeed connected via radio to the control center but rest assured, it is not being intercepted or overridden by external agencies.
This one had a malfunction, went into a fail-safe mode, ran out of fuel, and landed more-or-less intact. Of course they are claiming more than that.
Brett
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."
What could possibly go wrong?
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
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.
Snoop it all you like
Ok so you've got this unbreakable communications connection between drone and control...
Please explain the completely undamaged big beige plane sitting in the Iranian hangar.
Deleted
I have some friends that are ex military (USAF and US Army) that sent all their buddies that were still in and I can back up what you are saying, as nearly all of them wanted me to load games and apps on big flash drives. I had never heard of a "game stick' as they called it and it was explained to me that while there are PCs everywhere the connections are locked down and spotty so they just load games on the sticks and that way when they have down time they can "data dump" as they called it and unwind with some games.
Looking at the video in TFA I have to agree that it doesn't look really damaged so either a computer bug from those bazillion flash sticks brought it down or they had an engine malfunction and it autoglided itself to a landing. maybe its because i'm not a military guy but I was amazed that they all just walk around popping sticks in everywhere, that is the kind of crap i would have brought to a screeching halt when i was working corporate and i can't believe that the US military just lets them go around popping sticks. Hell with the kind of money we spend on the military they ought to just contract out to one of the OEMs to have a nice ruggedized AMD netbook handed out to each soldier and then epoxy all the USB ports on the work machines.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Even if you manage to disrupt 5% of the bits of a spread-spectrum signal, this can easily be repaired by sufficient amounts of Forward Error Correction Bits. Look it up in wikipedia. Proper spread-spectrum links such as SINCGARS (now decades old) are virtually impossible to jam effectively. You would need your own power station and transmitters capable of transforming that into RF to completely saturate from (say) 10 MHz to 85 MHz to take out a SINCGARS link.
This needs to be repeated. We used SINCGARS when I was in the Army over 20 years ago. I can not be jammed. I can not be eavesdropped. It changes frequency over 100 times a second. If you gave the guy who invented it the previous 10 minutes of frequencies, he could not tell you what the next frequency is going to be.
Again, this was over 20 years ago. I seriously hope that our military is at least using the same SINCGARS I used when I was in the Army.
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