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.
putting aside allegiances for a moment and looking at this from a purely engineering standpoint: bad ASS!!
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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?
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.
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.
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.