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.'"

Comments

The truth slowly comes out

[elrous0]

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.

Re:The truth slowly comes out

[Ardeaem]

The government doesn't like us because of the Shah and differences in how religion should affect policy, and they never will.

Silly Iranians, so mad that we propped up a horribly oppressive regime. ("Maybe a better, simpler solution is to build good relations with those who oppose you?" would have been a good rule back then, too, eh?) Also, "and they never will" is a dumb statement to make. Being "nice" to nations can do wonders. After all, we turned Japan, our mortal enemy in WW2, with no history of democracy, on whom we dropped two atomic weapons, into one of our closest allies in just a few decades.

Re:The truth slowly comes out

[Squiddie]

Except that we realize what Israel plans to do with their weapons if they do lose a war and have to negotiate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_option A nation with this thought process does not deserve nuclear armament.

Re:The truth slowly comes out

[martin-boundary]

You clearly don't understand the point of the puzzle. There's a fundamental difference between "knowing" (suspecting) that something is true, and knowing thateveryone knows that something is true, and knowing that everyone knows that everyone knows that something is true, etc.

Think about how stable the system in the puzzle is before the stranger arrives, and after the stranger arrives.

Re:Military using common GPS?

[Bugs42]

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.