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.
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
I'm surprised that it didn't have some sort of dead-reckoning or inertial system as a backup in such cases. If the dead-reckoning says "whoa, it is physically impossible for you to be anywhere NEAR where you think you are so ignore the GPS, go on inertial" ...
(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.
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?
Very. The military GPS signals are encrypted with some pretty large keys that are changed every 24 hours IIRC. However, the nav systems will probably fall back to using the civilian GPS if the military signal is unavailable for some reason. My guess is that you could drown out all the real GPS signals with noise, then feed the target some spoofed civilian signals to get it to go where you want.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
Being captured is not a problem, in fact it is a lobbying positive since it means that the Military Industrial Complex now needs more money to carve out a technological lead. The worst thing that can happen from a funding perspective is that the US military is perceived as so far ahead that it can't be technically challenged.
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.
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?
On board ships in the Navy, prior to GSP we always had to double check true north against magnetic north. There needs to be sort of this redundancy check on these things. GPS seems too easy to spoof.
I recall a documentary about US aircraft carriers showing something along these lines. A crewman had a camera crew follow him out to an observation point where where he measured the position of the sun with a mechanical sextant and then went inside to the bridge and recorded the time from a mechanical chronometer. He then plotted the ships position. When asked why he was doing this he explained that the ship has GPS, LORAN, inertial and other navigational systems. He then added that this ship was a warship and is expected to navigate when all the electronics are gone.
Not all self destruct sequences are modelled off the starship enterprise. Some of them are quite simple really. Use a switch to connect high voltages to a sensitive microcontroller with all your fancy code for instance.
Heck just look at credit card machines for some examples. There's a complex array of anti-tamper systems which serve to disable or erase sensitive parts to making debit transactions work if its opened, cracked, drilled, exposed to light etc.
All that and you leave out a innocent civilian body count at least three times the number slaughtered by Sadam? Hey, let me go all Godwin and ask how big does a massacre have to be to qualify as a Nazi-esque Order of Magnitude Genocide (NOMG)? 500,000? a million?