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.
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?
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.
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.
Those GPS spoofers got to Slashdot too, apparantly, fooling the editors into thinking that the drone landed in Iraq.
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."
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.
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.
Iraq is a suburb of Iran, thanks to an ill-advised, expensive, badly-planned and utterly botched invasion that rivals only Operation Market Garden in the degree of utter failure.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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?
"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.]
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.
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 assume that Iran doesn't have any spies in U.S., and that they don't know for sure that CIA has already figured out how, exactly, the drone was hijacked.
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/
Trusting the Iranian PR less than the CIA PR is either impressive or stupid. (Depending on how much you trust the CIA PR.)
The CIA PR is totally untrustworthy. You can't even depend on them to lie. I would guess that the Iranian PR is slightly more trustworthy, because they have a bit less practice at lying. But I would find myself incapable of trusting them less than I trust the CIA, even if I thought they were equally practiced.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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!
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
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.
How was the invasion successful? It failed on every one of its objectives (it allowed Al Queda not only in but to steal vast quantities of RDX other high explosives, it failed to capture or eliminate Saddam Hussein, it caused the total fragmentation of international resolve, it destroyed massive quantities of infrastructure - a violation of Sun Tzu's instructions, it broke the Middle East stalemate between Iraq and Iran, it succeeded in killing figures who would have been useful in rebuilding).
It also caused widespread looting -- not only by Iraqis, as US soldiers plundered substantial amounts of archaeological relics from Babylon. Since history is a valuable resource and cannot be replaced, destruction of it by the invasion force substantially damaged Iraq's capacity to rebuild. Something the US troops who looted knew damn well at the time. I will accept no excuses and believe firmly that no forgiveness should ever be given for those who raped such sites.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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."
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 theory wasn't entirely unsound. Nearly every air to air victory in the past decade has been via missile.
The problem was that during Vietnam, as many as half of the missiles didn't even ignite - they just fell to the ground inert. Of those that lit, fewer than half did anything other than fly in a straight line. And even if you had one a missile whose engine lit, the guidance tracked, and it was near the target - it's all for nothing if the explosives don't detonate. Pilots often ripple-fired 4-6 missiles at once, in the hope that one would work.
The reliability gained by almost 50 years of air to air missile development since Vietnam has changed the situation considerably.
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.
You're putting a lot of trust in a propaganda piece from a country with a perfectly reasonable score to settle. At this point, I'd say the Iranians are (and should be) playing the propaganda for all they can, espescially on the home front.
If you look at propaganda from the past century, you'd notice that the pattern is similar: Make a claim that "your team" outsmarted the enemy, and that's the reason for an event. It's pure BS, but that doesn't mean it won't play well for your allies and at the homefront.
These drones aren't purpose-designed to spy on low-tech countries. They're designed to be able to go into far more advanced countries (ie. Russia and China) that are more than capable of toying with GPS, and in fact, where altering and jamming GPS is expected.
Electronic warfare is 70+ years old at this point, and the questionable reliability of radio signals (espescially in the face of jamming) are well known. Being able to complete your mission with massive radio jamming is a requirement for anything that flies for the US military, and has been for generations.
We don't know whether the drone had inertial navigation or not - given the size and cost involved, there's no reason it shouldn't have inertial navigation - in fact, I find it hard to believe it doesn't use INS. US cruise and ballistic missiles use INS, as do warplanes - specifically because it's well-known that GPS can't be counted on.
If the drone does have INS (as well as terrain mapping, or both which is what I suspect), it's extremely unlikely that the Iranian story has even a hint of truth to it.
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.
That’s why I dont' believe it. Were it less comedic, I'd have no trouble with the story.
It's great political theatre, but it doesn't line up with what I know about the technologies involved. I've built robots for the military. While gimmicking GPS is doable, it's only a piece of the puzzle - and one that can be easily gamed. It makes for great propaganda, but it overlooks the other systems that have to be onboard for the thing to fly.
Drones have multiple independent means of determining its location, because GPS can't be counted on in a full-on war; it's one of the first things to fall in electronic warfare. INS is cheap, has been used for decades, and still is used because it can't be messed with externally. Terrain mapping is relatively new, but is also cheap to implement, and one of the drone's missions is to scan the terrain (with millimeter band radar).
So unless the Iranians somehow found a way to externally modify INS, as well as shift large-scale sections (at least a hundred square miles) geography of the region in real-time, the GPS story just doesn't hold up.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
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.
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
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 would guess that the Iranian PR is slightly more trustworthy, because they have a bit less practice at lying.
I was with you up to that point, but this's naive. Iran/Persia's got a few thousand years more experience in just about everything than the USA has. Xerxes was a master of PR.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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?
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...
Yeah, put a satellite (and a nuclear one, no less) on geo-stat orbit over Iran... to save a RC airplane model... makes perfect sense (if it's not geo-sync, most of the time the signal won't come from above)
I can't see a viable strategy for jamming laser UV or X-Rays. These types of lasers can even transmit through clouds.
What the hell are you smoking? UV is blocked by the clouds, dispersed by dust, bent/distorted by inhomogeneous atmosphere. As for the Xaser, you imagine them operating in a continuous beam? Sorry to disappoint, 1-100 pico-sec pulses is what you get - you don't have mirrors for X-ray frequency. Not to mention that after 1 to 15 m in air, X-ray is attenuated to approx 37%.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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;