Slashdot Mirror
US Sentinel Drone Fooled Into Landing With GPS Spoofing
McGruber writes "Following up on the earlier Slashdot story, the Christian Science Monitor now reports that GPS spoofing was used to get the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone to land in Iran. According to an Iranian engineer quoted in the article, 'By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.' Apparently, once it loses its brain, the bird relies on GPS signals to get home. By spoofing GPS, Iranian engineers were able to get the drone to 'land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications.'"
The more important aspect of the truth that's slowly leaking out is that U.S. officials are finally admitting that it was on a spy mission inside Iran and dropping that ridiculous cover story that it was just flying around Afghanistan and accidentally may have strayed into Iran (oopsy, whoopsy, did we cross your border?!?).
Of course, most non-idiots have known for some time that the CIA and Mossad have been in a state of undeclared war with Iran for several years now--assassinating their best nuke scientists and engineers, spying on their facilities, helping fund the Green movement, releasing Stuxnet and other viruses aimed at sabotaging them. etc., etc. But die-hard apologists (who seem to think that all those people at the CIA just stare at the wall all day, I suppose) have refused to accept this. These are probably the same people who believe the Pakistani government when they claim they had no idea Osama Bin Laden was in that compound in Abbottabad and that they're still our good friends (please keep sending us your money, infidel allies). But I digress.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Following up on the earlier Slashdot story, the Christian Science Monitor now reports that GPS spoofing was used to get the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone to land in Iraq.
I'm not sure how having the drone land in Iraq is supposed to benefit the Iranians...
I just know somewhere in the process of the multi-billion dollar drone development project someone must have said, "You know. I think a self-destruct mechanism might be a good thing to add." Of course, I can also imagine someone saying, "Yeah, they'll never even see it. It's stealth."
putting aside allegiances for a moment and looking at this from a purely engineering standpoint: bad ASS!!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
So, first of all, this is just really neat. It sounds like something that would happen in a movie. That's some movie-hacker shit right there.
That aside, the thing that really worries me here is that the military's GPS was able to be spoofed in the first place. One would think that the GPS the military relies on would be encrypted or something, y'know? How difficult is it to spoof military GPS?
Than Iranian UFOs
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Another kind of piracy SOPA will not stop
was an expensive military drone using civilian GPS? The military has encrypted GPS signals (the P codes), which I very much doubt have been cracked. I'll bet someone made a decision to fallback to relying on unencrypted signals, instead of self-destructing after X minutes, upon loss of the encrypted signals.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Also, there was the 2nd drone crash that happened recently after the Iran one, here. They didn't cover this one as voluminously it seems. And now we see this.
Bad month for US drone interest and parties involved.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
not Iraq as the summary says.
It should rely on inertial navigation and only use GPS to correct itself once in a while. I can't believe there's no checking against a physical model. The thing's moving at x speed in y direction, but suddenly the GPS indicates it's actually moved instantaneously more than the % of error from the INS? Nonsense.
A man in the pilot seat.
(land in Iraq, really?) Anyway, jamming isn't terribly difficult, especially when you're that close to the receiver. But "spoofing" GPS signals is a great deal more challenging. It's not the data on the gps signal, it's the timing that is the position information. If they were able to pull THAT off, they deserve the drone. and a pat on the back.
If I had to guess I'd say they were lying about doing that, possibly hoping to make the US start questioning their reliance on GPS, since it's proving such a handy arms tool.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
So the upshot is to secure GPS communications to prevent spoofing using countermeasures as discussed here.
These are the same Iranians who say they'll be mass producing clones of this thing "real soon now" and that they can "cut the hands off of" anyone who crosses them, so take their claim of how they got the drone with a similar grain of salt.
2283 Australian ./ers saw this title and immediately visualised the GPS antenna on the drone getting clogged with the good stuff.
From the summary: "GPS spoofing was used to get the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone to land in Iraq."
Iraq? Did it land on the border and where? Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't crossing a border to steal a military item be an act of war?
Or is it just a typo?
I8-D
Anyone else notice how similar this is to Terminator: Salvation?
Humans: We found a way to shut down the machines with this special code. :)
Skynet: heh-heh.
Humans: Oh no, the special code was a ruse and doesn't work. We're all dead.
Skynet:
BOOM.
Those GPS spoofers got to Slashdot too, apparantly, fooling the editors into thinking that the drone landed in Iraq.
Are we still flying these over Iran or other potentially hostile territories while a solution is implemented?
'just means they will put a compass in the next one. Let see them thwart a compass!
Turn your car into a drone.
Following up on the earlier Slashdot story, the Christian Science Monitor now reports that GPS spoofing was used to get the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone to land in Iran.
FTFTFS. TFA got it right. They got the drone to land in Iran.
By spoofing GPS, Iranian Engineers were able to get the drone to 'land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications.
So they hacked our drone and tricked it into venturing into their airspace. Obama needs to put on his big boy pants and demand they return it immediately. Until proven otherwise, they've admitted that it was only in Iran because they deliberately tricked it into crossing the border. They don't get to claim finders keepers for that.
It's a trojan horse somehow, ...
FTA:
"We all feel drunk [with happiness] now," says the Iranian engineer. "Have you ever had a new laptop? Imagine that excitement multiplied many-fold."
I'm guessing that this type of thing has not happened before so no one thought of it, but it seems a little bit of code in the drone that did a kind of double check would have made sense.
Something along the lines of: Hey, I was just flying over Iran (insert GPS coord's here) and now suddenly I've traveled x thousand miles to my home and I should land. Hmm, that doesn't make sense, maybe I should do: 1) blow myself up, 2) fly for a little while longer to see if I get sensible data, 3) ?
If a spy drone could be made to land that easily, it really concerns me about what other 'bugs' exist in the automated military hardware that exists.
Is how the hell was our super high tech 'stealth' spy drone spotted in the first place so it COULD be spoofed? Looks like the billions of dollars spent coming with *that* model went to good use.
They probably have the real helicopter tail section from the Bin Laden snuff operation.
You don't have to crack the encryption. You can just record and playback the signals from the satellites, with appropriate time delays, at an intensity several orders of magnitude higher than the drone would receive the signals from the satellites.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Wow. Just... wow. Good thing no one has thought to put any, say, sidewinder missiles on these puppies. How hard would it be to take one over and blow the crap out of....
Wait, never mind.
USA! USA! USA!
Whas China involved in sending Iraq information on these drones that would allow them to be compromized?
China has hacked into pretty much everything and stolen with impunity from everyone including defence contractors... (Oh, no, where're not a war with China either...)
Could China have passed technical specifications of these drones to their ally Iran?
This story sounds like more propaganda spin.
The GPS network satelites broadcast two signals:
Encrpyted - Used by the US Military
Unencrypted - Everyone one else (Including pilots, car navigation, your hand held gps...)
The Accuracy of the encrypted signal is much higher than the unencrypted signal. In fact the Military has the ability to vary the degree of accuracy and drift of the unencrypted gps signal. They use to vary it daily to keep enemys from using it against us. A practice that has subsided now that air travel and other services rely so heavily on GPS. Yet the Military still maintains and excerts the ability to manipulate the gps accuracy in any zone.
Its much more difficult to "spoof" an encrypted signal.
And images of the bird show damage to the wing indicating it smashed into something hard enough to dent and tear the carbon composite outer skin.
But "spoofing" GPS signals is a great deal more challenging.
Surely not. I am certain it formed the basis for a James Bond movie back in the 90's. If the concept has been mainstream for all that time, the only real surprise is that nobody has succeeded in doing it before.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
What happens when Iran or some other country uses this technology to cause one of our manned combat aircraft or worse yet a civilian aircraft to overfly their airspace and then they shoot it down?
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
That was my first obvious guess. We've been doing reconnaissance overflights of hostile countries since at least the Cold War.
But now the Iranians claim they effectively had control over the aircraft. If true, they could have easily jammed it in foreign airspace and led it to an Iranian landing. I trust them to tell the truth less than I trust the CIA.
I'm surprised that the drone used such a simpleminded technique as the one described in the article. For centuries, sailors have used a technique called dead reckoning that extrapolates from a previously known position, speed, and direction to an estimated current position. Today, when navigation instruments fail, sailors still use the technique. A friend of mine crewed on a boat sailing from Norfolk, VA to St. Thomas, USVI (roughly 1500 miles) using nothing but dead reckoning. When they arrived in St. Thomas, they were about two miles off course. I'm not a drone expert, but the attack that the Iranians mounted against the drone could easily have been defeated using other countermeasures besides GPS signals.
I think the next movie also had an invisible Aston Martin Vanquish (or was that a Vanish?). So, three years from now I expect to see the Iranians driving invisible sports cars. (Oh wait -- I guess I can't see it, but I at least expect the Iranian government to tell me that's happening!)
"What, our multimillion dollar RC aeroplane with super special awesome shooty bits on it got STOLEN? I thought those people were a bunch of camel riding nomads that didn't even have electricity! How did they spoof our GPS and jam our command and control feeds!?"
"Well sir, yes, the drone was actually stolen and not shot down. As for their offensive technical abilities sir, they *are* developing nuclear weapons, and most of their population is not comprised of nomadic camel riders, sir."
"Are you mockin' me son?! I've served in this god-blessed nation's armed forces muh entire life! And now you intend to tell me, that some turban wearin camel humpers not only defeated state of the art tactical surveylance like it was child's play, and didn't knock it down with rocks or summat', but that their so called nuclear program is actually viable, AND that my assessment of their "society" is plain and simply 'wrong'?!"
"No sir, I am not mocking you sir, but the rest of what you said is true sir."
"Get out of here private! I don't know who assigned you to technical liason, but they obviously picked a mo-ron. If I could demote you any lower than private, rest assured the orders would go through expediently!"
[I am probably (hopefully) wrong about this caricature, but this sure looks like how things are being run.]
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/s-hashing/index.html#h5
. . . so do they use GPS, or do they "feel" their way across a programmed landscape? The V-1 was just pointed in the direction of London, and had some kind of timer / distance gadget hooked up to a tiny propeller.
Now if someone builds a portable version of this spoofer, for use near a busy airport . . . uh-oh . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The United States spends more on military toys and the US military in general than *all* of the other nations in the world *combined* (which includes Russia and China). Yet, as was shown in Viet Nam, as was shown in Iraq, and is being shown in Afghanistan, the US military, with all its high tech toys, can be defeated by simple, low-tech (and cheap) devices made up of 25 bucks of Radio Shack parts. The US military has it's "eye on the ball", yet it continues to over estimate its power and the effectiveness of its toys. Trillions of US dollars down the drain every year for military toys and invasions of other countries which pose absolutely no threat to the US, and for what? A false sense of security at best.
But without the encryption being broken, the time would be incorrect on the replayed signals...
You only have to delay the signals a few microseconds. Especially if you slowly ramp up the delays, the drone GPS receiver should track with it.
I'm still guessing that the Iranians are lying here; and that the drone suffered a serious failure and just glided to a landing.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
its not a huge deal. even JSTARS and other current battle management platforms have huge security holes. for example current battle management consoles use single threaded i/o handlers on X windows sessions. a rogue trojan getting on the battle management server could simply crash all operators i/o including mice keyboards etc just by disabling X server i/o. poof! one thread crash and your battle management system is shut down until an admin can get into the server (very hard, impossible in combat situations), or more likely you land/shut off your BMS and ship it back to the manufacturer.
Gang aft agley
posted on slashdot not to long ago the weakness of current GPS systems... some trucker was driving past Newark Airport in NJ with a GPS Blocker so he can avoid tolls.... it was almost shutting down all operations just from him driving by with one of these in his cig lighter.
Various governmental departments, people, staff, generals, politicians are involved upto their necks in the development and robotisation and automation of weapons systems. Only the cretinously stupid could believe that they might build giant fleets of robot aircraft that are controlled from somewhere else, and have a wireless (I use the term loosely) method of command and control. The absolute faith in the idea that you can make such systems and maintain a functional and viable operation was just nullified by a second / third world state. I am *glad* they have done so.
It could be far worse.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/
The technology at somepoint has to be broken down to grunt level (because at the end of the day, grunts hump around and do the fighting, and are mucho cheaper than scientists or expensive pilots who you 'retired' or made redundant as part of the 'benefits' of moving to a drone fleet.
Foreign powers like the chinese would not even have to invest in the structures to match, they just look at how the core can be circumvented, and they gain control of your fleet and bomb you back to your own stone age by your own weapons. And you'd deserve every inch of it for your own stupidity.
The last time I can recollect in this level of folly in aeronautics was in pre Vietnam days where the US got itself into a high level theory that manned flight and guns were no longer needed. It could all be done with missiles.
The US and the West in general have suffered a disaster of large proportion. The technology was circumvented, and is now sat in the enemies hands. Soon it will be sold on to the Chinese and Russians, and the billions spend in the core research handed over to the enemy states for just about zero.
The US might have played a part in Stuxnet, and since that day, automated systems have been rightly under the review rader. The paradoxical level of comedy that the Iranians just Stux'xxed a US drone out of the sky and onto their landing strips just makes the paradox a hilarious one.
The last thing I ever want to see is the disgusting Mullahs crowing around on their media, making a mockery of the universe. But they got themselves a bunch of prestige they do not deserve, and its ass kicking time in the US. Heads need to roll, and a complete revision of this stupidity needs to take place.
We`re all equal
"Something along the lines of: Hey, I was just flying over Iran (insert GPS coord's here) and now suddenly I've traveled x thousand miles to my home and I should land. Hmm, that doesn't make sense, maybe I should do: 1) blow myself up, 2) fly for a little while longer to see if I get sensible data, 3) ?"
These drones were built to fight analphabet pedestrians with self-built Kalashnikovs without any modern tech and erroneously used against a 'modern' state not bombed into the stone age.
There is some encrypting of signals and data channels that i dont believe can be spoofed as such, but there is always the possibility of the UAV not implementing those correctly .. and we wil never know for sure. Status quo? This story is no better than gossip fiction.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
Ok. The Iranians have some very bright and talented people and are strongly motivated.
But, if I'd just pulled off a major coup by spoofing a drone using the same military gps as various guided weapons that might be launched at me in the future (by Israel, maybe.), would I go around talking loudly about how I did it and claiming I could do it to guided weapons?
Wouldn't it make more sense to stay a little quiet about it, and maybe the enemy wouldn't figure out how it was done and not refit their systems to be more spoofing resistant? Maybe they would, but you wouldn't automatically assume that.
Of course, if I'd found some other slick way of getting a high tech prize line this drone, I'd try to put out some FUD with a somewhat plausible cover story. That undermines confidence in the enemy's systems, and might be enough smoke to keep them from guessing how it was really done.
In a couple of years, I'm sure we'll see knockoffs being deployed by 3rd world countries.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
why didnt this drone keep track of where it was visually or use it's sophisticated instruments to keep a running record of where it really was? this thing cost zillions to develop and what do we get? total hacks writing the software and crap for QA.
the drone in iran was a dumb idea to begin with but now it's just a big demonstration of incompetence.
troll? maybe. deserved? absolutely.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Include a counter.
If(I the signal encryption is wrong OR the timestamp is off by too much OR I've seen this message ID before) THEN [ignore GPS]
Those who understand binary notation, and those who do not.
I'm looking forward to seeing the Iranian's presentation at BlackHat, this year!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Delay all the signals by on the order of a few microseconds. Yes, the time would be wrong, but there aren't atomic clocks in those drones. Yet.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
You may just have hit the nail on the head. Except the lying part.
It's not inconceivable that the drone would have a GPS and INS system but as long as the signal drift isn't beyond what the drone might expect for wind it may not question the GPS and INS not being in sync.
Delaying the signal slightly, and increasing the delay you can certainly put it off course. The INS with no idea of the movement of the air mass and as long as it's within what could reasonably be expected for atmospheric conditions would still agree with the GPS. The drone may just decide it's out of comms link is flying in a strong tail wind, with a crosswind component and you can probably make it land within reason somewhere convenient for you.
The really clever bit isn't figuring out how it was done, it's figuring out that it could be done in the first place and pulling it off. Assuming they did what they said they've done it's one hell of a hack. Hats off to them.
Why aren't they using inertia guidance like the military has been doing successfully for many many decades? It should have at least been a backup system to indicate that something was going wrong. This is even in consumer devices.
So the only plausible explanation is that the control channel was hacked and it was safely landed. But in order to do that you would need to jam the satellite broadcast but allow your connection to be received by the plane. Maybe they have a plane flying above the drone that creates destructive interference with the satellite signal and then broadcasts it's own signal to the drone below? This would basically be a man in the middle attack against the drone. If you just jam the satellite, then the drone's receiver will also pick up the jammed signal and will have a hard time receiving your pirate broadcast.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2564952&cid=38307186
It is amazing to me Lockheed was not counter balancing the GPS with some sort of Inertial Guidance system as a sanity check. The computer assumed it was at its point of landing in such short notice? Bad check and balance programing on someones part.
I bet it's configurable so that it can beat GPS spoofing, but doing so is unreliable and/or untested so they have it turned off for 'peacetime' missions because of the danger of it losing control. It's better to have it captured than have it crash and kill civilians in neutral or friendly country, so they have it in ultra-safe mode for now.
Basically they're worried that the fallback AI it uses when it loses communications would start running amuck and killing people, so they have it turned off.
So this country seems to be capable of thwarting our latest tech, which would be a lot of trouble in a future conflict. Can we switch sides and be their allies now? What did they do to tick us off, again? I don't remember.
Maybe Iran is the first country to implement the Lightsquared network and we just saw the first test.
PublicIntelligence has a copy of an April, 2011 report identifying problems with drone communications including the risk of jamming and "lost link" events: http://publicintelligence.net/usaf-drones-in-irregular-warfare/
For everyone who says, ``I can't believe there was no auto-self-ded-reckoning system'' remember these are all filled by the lowest bidder. Those features cost extra....
Time can't be "wrong", time is what GPS units use to calculate position! If it's delayed, it means the bird seems to bes further away.
I don't see why a drone couldn't be fitted with a special receiver for a laser signal sent from a satellite. Pretty hard to jam a signal from above.
A nuclear satellite can easily having enough power for multiple laser transmitters. The transmissions would only be one way but that's good enough to send it telemetry. The satellite could itself could figure out the approximate crafts position visually. And it would only be used when radio contact is down and or it goes off course. And of course it could have lasers itself for transmission.
An even better solution is having a high flying drone to relay signals from lower flying drones. As exponentially harder achievement would be jamming and faking out two drones simultaneously.
I can't see a viable strategy for jamming laser UV or X-Rays. These types of lasers can even transmit through clouds.
....install one for cross-reference.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If the Iranians cleverly caused one of our most sophisticated stealth drones to land where they wanted it to -- in undoubtedly one of the neatest thefts in the digital age -- then the laughter in their command center upon receiving Barach Obama's request for its return must have been thundering. What's the Farsi equivalent of "Say what dude?" The genius of this theft is that the Iranians didn't really need to know where the stealth drone was for sure perhaps because the stealthiness was probably effective; they just needed to suspect that a drone was flying at a certain time in order to pull off their experiment ... which probably to their immense surprise, actually WORKED. Shame on our Pentagon and/or CIA for YET AGAIN underestimatinng the smarts, resolve, wherewithal, and luck of our enemies. Who would have thought that something so precious and expensive could be so easily compromised? Somebody needs to be ass-whipped and then fired because of this arrogant stupidity. How long before our enemies' copies of these stealthy drones are flying over the U.S. in preparation for some kind of incursion? What a f..king monumental blunder!
"Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”
I would have assumed there was a level of encryption in the GPS signals so the military could certify that the data is correct, in addition to deciphering data with additional accuracy. Are you telling me that the military didn't bother to use signed packets and any joker with a relatively weak radio transmitter can trick nearby GPS using devices? Your tax dollars hard at work.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
what about "record orignal gps signals, delay, broadcast recorded signal"? GPS is a one way system and receivers rely soley on timing differences between satelites for position and doppler effect for speed measurements.
That is the entire point. a slightly delayed signal with the same time as the original signal is no different than being further away from the original signal.
This story about the Iranians 'spoofing GPS' sounds unlikely. Jamming, sure, that would be easy. Spoofing, not so. I'd say it is way more likely they intercepted the (relatively slow) drone and found a way to force it down (stall its engine by dousing it with water, throw a parachute at the air intake, whatever). It would not surprise me one bit if the thing just went down all by itself and was found by the Iranians. It is not like those defense contractors are know for delivering high quality materials after all...
--frank[at]unternet.org
The old/new coke thing is when they phased in high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar.
The delay gave everyone long enough to forget what it was supposed to taste like...
Mexican coke still has sugar in it, and is best for mixed drinks. :)
Asking for "Mexican Coke" at Kroger's can give unexpected results, lol.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
i.e. since they removed their puppet leader. Before that the US was helping with the program.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/1108/Imminent-Iran-nuclear-threat-A-timeline-of-warnings-since-1979/Earliest-warnings-1979-84
Though I'll point out that the US only taxes for about 60% of it's spending, the rest is borrowed, so the taxpayer isn't paying yet. The bill hasn't yet come due.
Deleted
GPS devices are amazing tools but they are useless without the satellite signal. GPS is so convenient and easy that we are quickly losing our ability to function without it. Map making companies are going out of business. Commercial airplanes are forgoing longstanding navigational aids to rely on GPS. Boy Scouts probably don't spend much time with map and compass any more. Taxi drivers in London probably don't memorize 'London A-Z' any more. The military builds devices that rely on GPS for guidance (cruise missles, ICBMs, fighter jets, etc.) and now Iran hijacks one through the simple method of providing a substitute signal that was stronger than the main signal. Over reliance on GPS (or any one method of navigation) is foolish. Thank goodness, I've got the new TomTom.
can never be spoofed.... EVER... but, oh yeah, we killed it....
I'm fairly certain that won't wash. A signal which is significantly stronger than it should be will flag an error (in a mil grade rx at least).
Is it even remotely possible that this was done on purpose? Get it close enough to the border of Iran so they can use their GPS spoofer to take control of this drone and then Iran can take all the tech from this drone? Maybe the design is made in such a way that it still surveils its peripheral surrounds after capture? In effect we are testing their reverse engineering skills to find the smartest people to assassinate in the future? Any number of reasons could be thought up why they would "allow" this drone to be captured. I would be there is a reason it is in Iran's custody. And of course we have to ask for it back or it would look suspicious. Now how hard we really attempt to retrieve it will show how valuable it is to us.
So, they spoofed GPS, jammed the drone's communications, then convinced it to land with the spoofed GPS coordinates. That's awesome.
Then, uhhh, why exactly did you guys have the kids from the Tehran High school football team and pep squad make up banners to hide the undercarriage?
Don't get me wrong. Both sides have plenty invested in having their own version of the story be the authoritative version, and the odds of the general public finding out the truth any time this decade are infinitesimal at best. But what we've been shown doesn't currently support the "we made it land on its own because we're fucking badass and the Americans suck" theory. It supports the "we don't want you to see what the underbelly looks like, also, we're lousy artists" theory. The iranians might have brought it down, and it might have crashed on its own while inside Iranian borders. "Proof" is in short supply at the moment.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
The truth may be more, why worry so much about nukes when biological weapons have been called "the poor man's WMD" and any large state could make them and hide them?
We need to move to a new model of intrinisic security and mutual security, as I suggest here: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
There are few weapons in a conventional sense (drones, nukes, plagues, guns, etc.) that can not under fairly easily imaginable circumstances be turned against the wielder, either by taking it over in some way or by copying it.
But things like health, intelligence, creativity, integrity, and community -- these are some of the foundations of true security and they are very difficult to turn against the possessor.
Sadly, one other truth we must face is, as Marine Major General Smedley Butler said:
"War is a Racket"
http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
To move beyond that, we need to turn to "A Newer Way Of Thinking" like Albert Einstein called for:
http://anwot.org/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Seems kind of interesting that Iran knows more about U.S. spying aircraft than U.S. citizens do. And yes, I realize that in order to get the aircraft back it would have been WW III. I just have one question, "how long do I have to wait for Shiites to start manufacturing radar evading skin for my Camero, Hunter Green, please, and I hated having to drive 55 mph when it was mandatory."
There's a relatively easy way to put this to rest... the same way we handle software bugs. Replication.
1. Build useless, no-secrets-contained, basic drone that is easy to detect.
2. Outfit it with basically the same navigation system in use by the Real Thing.
3. Send it's sorry ass across the border.
4. See if it gets captured, the same way the Iranians claim to have done.
5. ???
6. Profit
If they really can do what they say they've done, they should be able to do it again.
Oh, and if they can, fire everyone involved with the drone project, hire some hollywood people that actually have some creative effing brains in their skulls, and make the remaining military engineers their bitches for the next project, so that nobody is surprised like this again.
Signed,
Anonymous Cowardly Bastard
As countless examples have shown "peace time" military engineering is crap and rarely takes account of a realistic risk asesment.
See Navy nuclear till Admiral Hyman G. Rickover took hold, nothing worked reliably.
Inertial 3 axis accelerometers are now often built into SoC or GPS chips and any such machine must have a compass,as well.
Using the inertial and compass should have a really very good dead reckoning guess, and when the GPS diverged it should have added to the ALARM caused by the lack of uplink and its hearbeat. Within seconds of the loss of uplink control the drone should have gone retrograde and headed for home plate.
The contractor and project manager should be sued.
All communications, without exception should be encrypted, with one mission keys if necessary.
Complexity, and the desire for the Perfect is, as always, the enemy of the good and reliable.
I don't buy this GPS spoofing theory because if they had spoofing technology they could've landed it in an airfield, thus avoiding the damage to the bottom side.
I'm not saying believe what the US government has to say on things. Skepticism of any government's official line is a good thing. However notice the "any government's" part there. What that means is you should also be skeptical of what Iran has to say. In fact I'd be more skeptical of them. In terms of making shit up, they have a far bigger track record than the US. Please remember this Iranian engineer is not speaking without his government's permission, they control the media quite directly over there.
I find it sad how many people on Slashdot distrust everything the US says but automatically trust anything a nation the US dislikes says. That means you are just a US hater, not a skeptic of the government. It is just the opposite side of the coin to someone who believes everything the US government says is true.
Personally, I don't think we are getting the whole truth from either side.
I mean, if an Iranian said it, it must be true.
Besides, haven't you noticed that everybody (besides you) on slashdot immediately believed every word of the article?
Seriously, this is news coming out of Iran. The entire story is "according to Iranian engineer."
I don't know, maybe it is true, but I see no reason to jump to any conclusions.
While I have never attempted to spoof a GPS signal, I can't help but believe that it is harder to get coordinates, time signals, speed and direction set to allow a moving platform to land safely at a set location on a revolving planet than is involved in making a router believe your coming from some other MAC address. In fact, it makes me wonder if maybe the CIA might have helped them out a little as they delivered their multi-million dollar thumb drive. When the Iranians plug their little USB cable into that inviting drone delivered port will they come to wish they had been running something like Linux instead of leaving themselves open for the latest Windows Zero Day exploit
Actually no, delay one/two/three of the signals from multiple satellites, so timing is wrong and receiver calculates different position.
+1 - timing difference shows that satellite as being further away. If you can repeat different delay for another satellite, you suddenly make receiver think it's somewhere else.
What if the reverse was true, that for example, a Mexican Drug Cartel had a drone spying on the border police. Should that spying be stopped.
So, it shows that Americans do not have exclusivity on intelligence, and their worst fears, the drone and its electronics is open to diagnosis and to revealing all the security secrets. Wow, what a huge blow to the Drone program.
Is this Tit for Tat, You hurt my centrafuges, I hurt your Drone program world-wide.
Hey enemies of the USA, Here are the Drone's secrets.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I have a hard time believing that we would fly a relatively slow, low-altitude aircraft into another country's airspace vice a very high-flying (and probably fast) manned or unmanned aircraft.
Consider what would have had to have been true for this to happen:
1. Not having a tested / validated method to ensure control of the UAV, even in the event of loss of control by the ground controller.
2. Not having a method to ensure authenticated / encrypted communication between the UAV and the ground controller.
3. No method of navigation other than GPS; no backup inertial-based system which is compared to the GPS data in order to validate the GPS-reported position. Inertial-based systems have been developed, tested, fielded, and proven well before the arrival of GPS. (Examples: cruise missile systems, civil airline industry.)
4. No method to destroy the UAV, either on command of the ground controller or automatic self-destruction in the event of loss of control by the ground controller for X period of time.
The idea that we would fly such a system, which is the cutting edge of so many technologies (stealth, avionics, sensors), into the airspace of a country who is hostile to us is so far beyond the pale that, absent evidence to the contrary, I just -cannot- believe it.
If the navigation system senses anything incorrect with the GPS signal, it is rejected. If the craft has lost the control link, and GPS is unreliable, it will fly inertial nav back to the contingency recovery airspace. You cannot spoof it down.
.
Very well done.
Bravo!
The "White House" and US DoD and DoS are sweating buckets now for sure!
Will we read of a "High Level" "I am resigning to spend more time with my family" thingy.
Stay tuned.
"By spoofing GPS, Iranian engineers were able to get the drone to 'land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications."
Spoofing GPS is very unlikely. More likely they did crack the remote control signals (and even more likely they bought the information to do it) and they don't want the US to know about how they actually took control of the plane.
Those who can count, and those who can't.
Yes you can. Using Mil-Spec GPS receivers (one in the nose and one in each wing-tip), attitude can be calculated quite accurately, and easily.
If Iran was killing scientist in israel, it would be called "assassination - state sponsored terrorism". Effectively Israel by killing scientist, no matter what they research *IS* doing state sponsored terrorism, is a rogue state as does the US if it supports this. What goes around....
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What you are proposing is called a "replay attack" and is well-known in crypto-lore; I'd be very surprised and somewhat disappointed if the US military hadn't taken (also well-known) couter-measures to that.
Looks like GLONASS now has full global coverage as of October 2011.
the secret service intentionally let the Iranians capture the drone? First thing the Iranians would do, is download information from the drone. Who knows, there may have been another stuxnet hidden inside... would be a very nice way to get into Irans intelligence IT structure :)
They fly these things from America. It would be much cheaper to buy URL address, VPN key and password from a kid, drone-pilot. I remember reading that drone pilots are recruited from gamers. Gamers are always in need of money for new hardware and new disks.
I read an article of a general who said that they conducted a battle by hanging out from a window in a Paris hotel a satellite antenna and rugged laptops on a bed.
If they could spoof the GPS, this would assume they had the home coordinates. They would have to have prior knowledge to where it was taking off from or would have had to been able to get those coordinates from the brain. If they could get the coordinates from the brain, why did they need to disable it to spoof the GPS?
Have you even been to Pakistan recently? Or Kashmir? What do you think of muslim suicide bombings in India?
Are you willing to move there and enjoy the fruits of this "peace" you are talking about?
And the drone wouldn't get suspicious upon receiving a GPS signal several orders of magnitude stronger than it ought to be?
Funny that this is sloshdat and no-one talks about the technicalities of what the Iranians did. The main thing you need to hijack a UAV is a GPS test set, which only costs a few thousand bucks.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It is weird how a technique developed on second world war is still in use. During WWII some smart english could understand and use to england advantage the way german bombers guide at night. They used more or less the same idea Iran has exploted here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams I am thrilled to learn what a fabulous income is war for US, and how easyly the mass media machine tricks US lambs to think what they need. Regards
If the guys who built this thing had any funken brains at all, it would be built so if you try to open it without knowing exactly the right way to do it, it would blow the funk out of itself or at least thermite its own innards. the folks who built it clearly had some brains, its a remote control plane that flies itself, so i hope we can all just relax about its precious secrets.
The planes have a degree of autonomy. When control is lost they have 'brains' and act according to a preset contingency plan. So jamming the comms isn't really a show stopper.
Spoofing? So the Iranians spoofed the ENCRYPTED GPS signal? Yeah, right. You can easily spoof the open signal but the military gear uses the high precision, encrypted GPS signal.
You could easily jam the GPS signal but then the inertial navigation system will kick in to get it home anyways. This is a standard design protocol because it is expected that the GPS signal will be lost sometimes.
These aren't Best Buy radio control helicopters. They are valued, high precision, high tech, high cost machines. They are not vulnerable to jamming or GPS. EMP or mechanical failure forcing an unexpected landing, that makes sense.
Anyways, Christian Science Monitor? WTF ?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Instead of relying on GPS to "go home" the bird should be logging information from an inertial guidance system and follow that track back until it can acquire the navigation signals it needs. Infrared terrain recognition would also be a viable fall-back. One question that needs to be answered is how the Iranians knew the bird was there in the first place.
You have the fundamental Islamic concept of taqiyya -- lying to one's enemies. We are considered enemies, so lying to us is practically a religious duty to them. This lying is even more ingrained in Shiite culture, as they've learned to lie to Sunnis in order to survive as the minority for hundreds of years.
Time can't be "wrong", time is what GPS units use to calculate position! If it's delayed, it means the bird seems to bes further away.
There you go. Delay all of the relevant signals by the relevant times and leave others undelayed. You've changed the calculated position. If the calculations don't work for the received signals, the receiver will assume it's clock drifted and rediscipline to the GPS signals.
Preventing replay attacks is easy. Drone has an internal clock. Drone detects that GPS signals are out of sync with internal clock, and thus determines they are being spoofed.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
The GPS system used by the USG is dual-channel, as opposed to the single channel system freely shared for commercial use. The system can be encrypted, but that would exclude all users without the keys, i.e., your Tom-Tom would go blind.
That said, for a ground-based system to jam the entire visible constellation and replace it with a terrestial signal is highly improbable due to several factors used to verify signal integrity.
Somebody's fibbing.
The Morrigan's Pet
you know, built from parts ordered from dealextreme.
there's a point to that you know too. because if you lose it, you only give them some crap they could have ordered from dx.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_attack
There are fixes for that very issue.
I am sure this has been brought up already though I have not seen it mentioned.
I remember reading somewhere recently about all of the hardware in U.S. Military equipment being made in China. Perhaps the Chinese wanted to take a look at the "Beast of Kandahar" and used some hardware "backdoor" in the Chinese produced GPS on board the drone to have it fly where they wanted it to. Iran takes any heat for it and China gets the technology?
It's amazing how little a grasp of basic engineering, or even common sense, your typical journalist has, or any other people who actually believe this bunk.
1) How does one "jam" a tight-beam satellite uplink? Electronic Warfare has been around for just as long as there has been radios on the battlefield, and people actually think that the possibility of jamming didn't occur to the craft's designers?
2) Jamming GPS, however, *can* be done; you just have to be louder than the broadcast signal. HOWEVER, see the first item. The possibility never occurred to the designers?
3) In order to "spoof" a GPS to such a precise degree as to make the aircraft land would require the Iranians to know the precise location (within a meter or two) of the craft in relationship to the terrain below it. A stealthed aircraft that even American systems have difficulty detecting, mind you. Otherwise, drone goes SPLAT.
4) Even assuming a miracle happens and 3) is actually accomplished, the aircraft is now scooting along the ground at several hundred miles per hour. How do you tell the craft to shut down its engine? Better yet, how do you get it to drop its landing gear?
So; after all this, let's play a bit of Occam's Razor: The drone suffered a major malfunction and splattered itself across the face of a mountain somewhere. The Iranians, in the hopes of deterring the Americans from sending more drones, cook up this cock-and-bull story of being able to bring the drones down intact. Their "proof" is a fiberglass model put together from released photos and media footage (Oh, look! The landing gear just *happens* to be concealed! Possibly because the Iranians don't know what it's supposed to look like?).
Now; doesn't this sound just a little bit more plausible?
Regards;
Thank you for your comment. It's always nice to see a fellow MMT-aware human spreading some useful links. Keep it up and keep calm in the inevitable debates that erupt ;)
Well, u had me until the last paragraph. They didn't have to 'cut' the engines or lower the landing gear. These 'drones' dont fly as fast as you think, their mission is to loiter and collect info. So, all the Iranians had to do is fool it into slowly descending until it finally hit the ground. If they were able to direct it to some flat area the whole thing would have looked like any aircraft that's trying to crash-land when the wheels don't descent.
I think Iran offered the drone candy. Yea that's what happened. Then the drone just came down to get the candy.
RSA IS BROKEN!
Military grade M-code GPS has two modes, red-key mode for classified hardware like stealth drones, and black-key mode for unclassified hardware. They each use RSA in symmetric & asymmetric modes, respectively.
Military GPS cannot be spoofed unless RSA is broken.
Did Iran get the secret red key? Or did they fast-factor the RSA semiprimes?
Yeah, that was funny but to address your last sentence, would we be bothering with all the high tech surveillance if we didn't see Iran as more than a bunch of "turban wearin camel humpers"?
--PM
The title should have said "Iran uses tractor beams to capture US drone".