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Iranian Military Says It's Copying US Drone
New submitter skipkent writes "Iran's military has started to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone captured last year after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported on Sunday. General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported."
Welcome our new Persian Robot Overlords.
It's obviously a copyright infringement. If we are lucky, maybe Iranians will just shoot them.
If only it were the RIAA or MPAA instead of the CIA, then Iran would be in serious trouble.
#1 I doubt it .....
#2 who is running things over there, Dr. Evil ?
#3 In the extremely unlikely event that they somehow figured it all out - why on earth would you tell everyone ?
It would be funny if they Open Sourced it.
Where Tony Stark pulls up the footage of other countries trying to duplicate his armor? Why do I have a feeling this is going to go something like that.
They might be able to copy the drone's form and appearance but the materials and electronic guts are way beyond their understanding.
Now I suddenly understand the strategic importance of ACTA. If they'd signed ACTA, we'd nail 'em when they tried to sell their cheap knockoffs to the Chinese, the Russians, the North-Koreans, the Pakistani, the Venezuelans, the Cubans, the Jemenites, the Hamaz guerilla's, and ... .
"All is as we have foreseen" mutters Leon Panetta as he leans back in his chair petting his cat in a darkened conference room.
"Yes... Take my gift... into your arms"
MWAHAHAHA
No concept of OPSEC, for one. You get a leg up on the Great Satan and the first thing you do is announce it to the press?
Secondly, even if they do reverse engineer it, they won't have the science and research which went into developing the technology. They might be able to learn how it works, but they won't understand why. And thus, they'll be able to produce duplicates of this drone while the U.S. continues to develop more advanced drones. This is basically what the Soviet Union did in trying to keep up with us. We remember how that worked out.
Are you kidding, we probably had this thing land their on purpose knowing this would happen. We've been looking for an acceptable way to occupy Iran for quite some time. This would be a win for both sides, who would want to change presidents with a new war breaking out, and on the GOP side, people think they will "Get the job done." Save for Ron Paul, everyone is looking for a chance to jump at Iran.
Is it just me, or does copying a $100m spy drone that you easily captured seem like a bad direction to go?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
The Iranian Military just announced they are copying this comment.
While Dubya was in office in the U.S., Iran had a President named Mohammed Khatami. Unlike Ahmedinejad, Khatami was a moderate cleric in favor of womens' rights, political reforms, greater freedoms for Iranians, and other moderate ideals. Khatami also was no opposed to political cooperation with the United States, or at least the restoration of diplomatic relations. Bush could easily have reached out a (limited) hand of friendship, and Khatami might very well have shaken it. Relations between Iran and the U.S. could have improved markedly. What happened instead? Bush's Neocon advisers wanted no cooperation/relationship whatosever to develop with Iran. They wanted to maintain Iran's status as an "Enemy of the United States" (perhaps because Israel was also adamant that things be so, and Iran stay politically isolated). So Dubya never reached out to Khatami politically, and actually did the diametric opposite: Iran was included in post 9/11 America's new, and somewhat stupid concept of a "Axis of Evil" that's messing up everything for everyone. No relationship between the U.S. and Iran whatsoever flourished as a result. Not even a limited one. And what happened to Khatami? The moderate Iran President was eventually overruled by Iran's religious hardliners for being too "moderate" or "modern", and his post went to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. The window of opportunity for improving relations between Iran and the U.S./West to some degree was there. But the Neocons wanted Iran to stay on the "Enemies of the U.S." list, and did their best to ensure that no rapprochement with Iran would take place. -------- That brings us to today. Iran and the U.S. are currently enemies. Neither side sees any value in engaging in serious talks or toning down the jingoistic rhetoric. The Iran situation could, at any point, turn into another "Hot War" (Israel in particular seems to like that idea a lot). And all this because Dubya's advisers told him not to shake Khatami's hand. The situation could have been very, very different if the West had engaged in even "limited relations" with Khatami's vision of a more moderate Iran.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Hi Iran, we here at the US DoD notice you're trying to build a Predator UAV. Of course Predators are pretty toothless without Hellfire missiles. So to show there's no hard feelings, we decided to send you some. An entire shipment of Hellfire Missiles should be arriving at your reverse engineering facility in just about ... now.
I have worked for a number of companies that thought their employees were so much smarter than everyone else that no one could possibly understand their code by disassembling it. That's wrong.
In this particular game, yeah, they'd be right if they were talking U.S. programmers whose experience was Java, but people who had to deal with old hardware where memory locations mattered, no. I sometimes wonder at Apple folks who believe no one but them understands ARM assembly. I know at least three Russian programmers personally who can quote hex codes for ARM instructions for pretty much everything you'd want to do. I am guessing I am not connected enough to know them all.
People in the third world are at a significant advantage. They deal with the hardware and know what the hell they are doing. I personally blame the change in accreditation standards that caused U.S. people to concentrate on being rather than doing. Theory is great until you have to engage in total war.
I personally expect a wave of smart people to wash over the U.S. any time soon. The only question is whether they will have U.S. visas or if they will be employed by a foreign power.
-- Terry
-- Terry
With blenders and smoke detectors, I will copy their nuclear program!
Drones over Israel? Over the US?
I'd love to see either of those things happen, just to watch the reaction. The US seems to think it is fine to send spy drones over Iran, so presumably it's just fair game to send them over the mainland US too.
The US has spy satellites watching every corner of the earth, presumably the collective EU and China do too, Japan has some... Naturally Iran will be putting its own up at some point, and North Korea will too eventually. Fair's fair, right?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They didn't capture a drone intact, they displayed a mockup, and a bad one at that.
All this talk about creating their own drone is more propaganda to prop up the Iranian government's "rep" in the middle east among Islamic countries, who pretty much buy everything Iran's news agencies pump out, clonebrush photoshops, crappy models and all.
I would like to point out he even stole that quote.
Good-bye
At least they concentrate their resources on this rather than drones.
before violating airspace of a sovereign country.
Ron Paul and RMS should go and live on idealism island together.
Good-bye
...rather than nukes, I mean.
All the drones are based off tech from 20 years ago there is nothing worth having in the actual drone its not like its a big deal they could just buy old russian equipment thats probly just as good or some of the other old us stuff we sell off to different countrys. Why is the media trying to hype this up like they are goin to be a superpower from this?
The most I can see them doing is build a mockup that looks like it, showing it flying, and then the entire world concluding, "OMG, they copied the US drone!!!111" — except that it won't contain any of the systems and technology aboard the RQ-170.
Would be a great propaganda victory for Iran, though. Which is exactly the sort of thing they're looking for. Iran's playing up the drone story again, this week saying that Russia and China are aggressively seeking information about it, and then two days later making this "announcement"? With Iran claiming it used a force field and "advanced space technology" to down the drone (and no, this isn't simply a failure of the translation), nothing is too surprising.
Of course, US drones have been flying over Iran for years, and drones are still flying over Iran after the RQ-170 incident.
Interestingly, as the Western press and pundits hyperventilated over the loss of the drone, Iran's state-controlled media and spokesmen repeatedly changed and finessed their story to fit with the most panicked narratives of "what might have happened".
Logic would dictate that the drone simply malfunctioned and crashed, or at absolute MOST had its control link jammed — a known vulnerability of UAS — and was not brought down in a controlled fashion, nor has been "reverse-engineered".
It would be funny if they Open Sourced it.
Go right ahead. You still wouldn't get very far - even if you reversed engineered the code that fly it.
You see, there's also all the engineering with the airframe, avionics and the materials all the technology and science associated with those items.
Then there are the machine tools and other tooling and processes to actually construct it.
The closest analogy I can think of (sorry that it's not a pizza or car) would be a nuclear weapon. They're easy, right? Slam one piece of U235 into another with some dynamite until you get critical mass and BOOM! First, you got to enrich the Uranium.
Good luck with with that.
The United States winning any particular technological arms race benefits no one.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
...get the RIAA on their asses! :p
Just announce you're done with it, and compile all the highest bidders. Send grateful thank you message to all your free advertisers. Free enterprise works!
Thus proving his point.
What if the reaction was to bomb Iran into the stone age? With the justification that Iran was using WMDs? Or that Iran was threatening Israel?
Iran isn't a backwater. They have a robotics industry and a space program. Maybe not as sophisticated as Japan, and the US, but pilotless drones aren't designed with cutting edge technology. I don't see why this would be outside Iran's current capabilities.
They claim they jammed the control signal and spoofed the GPS (jammed the encrypted signal and spoofed the unencrypted signal which the drone fell back on). The drone then circled (possibly) and eventually decided to return to base and land, which happened at the spoofed location inside Iran. Do you really find that so extremely difficult to believe? Why do you think "logic dictates" that this is a lie? Alternatively, why do you think this doesn't qualify as bringing the drone down in a controlled fashion?
Iranians are hiring a full time employee to decrypt this data and provide full medical dental, retirement and medical leave for any US citizen. Yearly $150,000.00 Bonus: $50,000.00 annually Full medical insurance LOL
They're just going to take the one they have and put gold curtain rods & blue carpet in it.
(South Park)
Less-geeky computer repair alternative for Lansing, MI
Does slashcode support Farsi?
No one has commented about them "breaking the software encryption". I am surprised that it would be so easy to do. Could it be true ?
Does anyone has insight into what type of encryption is used or how it could be broken ? I'm pretty sure it's not ROT13.
Dumbest comment I've seen on the Internet in a while. And that's saying something.
Kythe
Logic doesn't come to any such conclusion unless there is already bias in the observer, which with your use of the words "panicked narratives" would indicate that you are.
The way I see it, they appear to have an undamaged US drone (and I tend to associate crash and aircraft as resulting in lots of bits), which the US by claiming it back seems to have verified. Beyond that everything is speculation because politics and propaganda gets involved.
create a drone with all types of computer virus' in its chips, lets it "crash land" in iran, then reap the rewards ?
Another proof that US is run by jews who want Iran gone.
You wouldn't be demonstrating the confirmation bias, would you? Just saying...
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
During the second world war airplanes flew over isolated pacific islands for the first time. One tribe that had never encountered technology built a bamboo and thatch airplane shaped idol of the God that flew over their island.
Pokemon I choose you!
I hope they don't copy the "crashing" part.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Lamborghinis are notorious for having very low mileage in the real world. You can't drive a status symbol, it might get dirty. Porsche 911, on the other hand, they get driven every day.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
How is drone technology a "secret"? Mixed UAV/FPV platforms are available for your everyday hobbyist at well under a few hundred $$$. Anyone with a basic grasp of high-school engineering could rig it up to drop bombs/shoot a gun/take pictures in a lazy weekend.
;)
Did someone not tell Iran this? Or is this just dick-waving? The real technology here would be the engines, radio technology and stealth properties of the airframe. Or maybe us hobbyists are good at laying low - considering the potentials of the technology, and Iran just isn't able to do a Google search because they blocked the Internet
'Undamaged' is relative. Remember they didn't show the undercarriage in their pictures, it was all gussied up with banners. Either the Iranians have decided that the drone is female and has to be modestly dressed, or the thing crash landed / wheels up landed and has a fair bit of damage.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Sorry, but they've either decoded the data or not. With modern decryption, there's really no in-between.
Or perhaps what they mean is that they've almost figured out the length and wingspan of the aircraft.
Actually, it is possible to lead a UAV by its nose if you have GPS test set. Anyhoo, they could make a balsa wood copy and fly it RC or with an Ardupilot from DIYdrones. Journalists won't know the difference.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Really? They really broke military-grade encryption?
I mean, with only open-source stuff, I'm able to keep my sensitive log files secure enough that you'd need access to more computational power on the planet for a few years to read them even with physical access. Thanks to Rivest et al, it just isn't that hard to make pragmatically unbreakable encryption. I don't have any direct evidence for it, but it's widely assumed that the US military has access to even better encryption than people like me who look up recipes on the web. So was the encryption really broken or is this propaganda?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Some years from now, the drone will be released from it's captivity making a triumphant return to its homeland. Maybe we can give it a novel price?
Copying onto stencil paper, does not really count.
So why aren't they bringing down every UAS that continues to fly surveillance missions over Iran?
Common sense doesn't have a bias.
Believing a drone whose undercarriage is completely obscured, probably due to significant damage, is "undamaged" is what's biased. The US asking for the drone back doesn't verify it didn't crash. It verifies they have our drone — which they do.
Only if you consider marketing to be art.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Are you kidding, we probably had this thing land their on purpose knowing this would happen. "
Yes, there's a platoon of teeny tiny marines hidden aboard.
Fucking Albert Chung...
They better watch the DRM on their effort...
Bingo!!! You, sir, have hit upon THE way for the U.S. to cloak our really secret drones. We'll label some female and some male. No one is allowed to look under the female drone's skirts lest Satan grab them by their hind parts (check out Martin Luther). Now, I know what you are thinking, they'll have female agents looking under those skirts. That's where American ingenuity comes in, we'll make them androgynous with BOTH parts.
Think about it - if your home country had a regime like Iran's and you had the means to live just about anywhere else, would you stick around? And if you did, would you work for that regime? There are selfish smart people (duh), but a significant portion of smart people want nothing to do with such a regime.
Indeed. That explains why, for example, there are no nuclear physicists in Iran.
And they're copying it????
It must. I see many highly rated comments that are farcical if you know much of anything about the topic under discussion.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Iran is a different strategic problem to Iraq or Afghanistan.
1. It is four times bigger (80 million people.)
2. It is an old culture, like Egypt, China, India.
3. There are not any "friendly" adjacent states (like Turkey, Pakistan).
After assessing these factors, I suspect US military planners advise against overt action.
Are they going to address the two big defects it apparently has; lack of a self-destruct mechanism and vulnerability to GPS jamming attack? Don't know how Lockheed (or whoever) missed those. Unless... Nah, it's probably nothing...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Many such leaks in past wound up dumped on the pirate bay, there's already tons of hacker dumps of giant corps floating around
http://zonehmirrors.net/defaced/2012/03/04/admin.digitalplayground.com/
Eventually The drones software will also be dumped, probably show up on Tor .onion sites first as most data dumps do nowdays
Now Iran will be invaded on the pretense of copyright infringement, the worst of the atrocities known to man!
Its not the drone thats the problem, anyone can make a drone...its the satellite that it communicates to is how the magic happens. I can make a drone now that has IR, HD Camera's, Tracking, Face rec, etc etc,but what good is it when it only goes 50 feet before it looses conneciton. Now then IRAN gets a SOLID satellite up and working, thats when we should be worried..
You really believe that claptrap? It is an interesting observation of our times that someone would believe a state-owned outlet of a totalitarian government before they would believe the US media.
They were aggressively atheist, but otherwise expressing any kind of politically incorrect thought got you a long cold and hungry rest-of-your-life-goodbye.
And yet they were state-of-the-art in rocketry, and catching up very rapidly in nuclear weapons, which, after their first bomb (designed by espionage), was mostly an indigenous capacity.
Well, let's see — not only is Iran Times is not state-owned, it is published in the US. It is also just repeating a Washington Post story. Further, the fact that the US is continuing to fly drone missions over Iran unabated runs counter to the Iranian government's narrative that they have the capability to "take down" a US drone in the first place.
Is FOX News a better source?
How about:
Stars and Stripes
Business Insider
Pokemon I choose you!
The battle of the drones begins. It seems that Iran's leader is a big fan of Mists of Pandaria!
Even if you completely ignore things like the remote data communication, reverse engineering the mission computer would take forever if it was possible at all. You've got dozens of LRUs (GPS, INS, analog to digital converters, MMR, etc). A lot if not most of this stuff isn't going to be functional on the ground.
Consider for a moment a Weight on Wheels switch. It's going to do a lot of important stuff. For instance, that's going to be one of the key functions that tells the radar not to power up and shoot a bunch of radiation directly into the technician's nutsack. The MC even on an old C-130 is a couple hundred thousand lines of code. The MIL-STD-1553B bus being used supports multiple channels with each channel supporting 32 LRUs (ignoring broadcast and the like, for simplicity). Each LRU will have 32 subaddresses, and each subaddress will consist of 32 16-bit words. We're looking at millions of bits potentially changing every single cycle. How long does it take to isolate which one corresponds to weight on wheels? How about the one that the MC sends to the radar to tell it not to power up while on the ground?
Or how about a different, more simple example. The unit will have a terrain following mode. If it's on the ground, that simply isn't going to work. There's no way you can simulate the conditions for the mission computer to receive an obstacle warning from the radar, then send out an override to the controls to modify course.
Millions and millions of bits changing every cycle. Even on ancient technology that runs at 20 Hz, you're looking at 20 cycles per second (which consists of one frame). Each bit within each cycle of each frame might correspond to a very different discrete signal.
It can be done, but it's not happening within a year. They're building a shell, but the important stuff is useless to them without much, much more time.
Source: I am a mission computer developer.
This is more a stunt to taunt and spite the U.S.. So what if they got some drone, how hard can it be to build a remote control drone? My neighbor has a remote control airplane, add a few things and it can be a drone. I doubt the drone has superior technology that can substantially benefit Iran that they didn't already have.
Neville Chamberlain would have been proud of Obama's negotiating skills. I guess when the President "asked for it back" they didn't feel like helping out.
It is possible to spoof a standard civilian GPS - however it is unlikely that was what was installed in the drone......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability_anti-spoofing_module
did NOT see that coming.... [rolls eyes]
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Receivers receive all the time. GPS receivers must be tuned to the frequency the satellite is broadcasting. Its not hard to send your own signal and confuse the drone, getting it to land. They might have said 'force field' and 'advanced space technology' but they really meant 'radio transmitter'. Once on the ground, make new Chinese and Russian friends by playing show-and-tell. The American technology is disseminated, and Russia and China give them a few free jets, or give them some after-hours Siemens SCADA controllers (ones that don't run cyclotron motors too fast).
They claim they jammed the control signal and spoofed the GPS (jammed the encrypted signal and spoofed the unencrypted signal which the drone fell back on). The drone then circled (possibly) and eventually decided to return to base and land, which happened at the spoofed location inside Iran. Do you really find that so extremely difficult to believe? Why do you think "logic dictates" that this is a lie? Alternatively, why do you think this doesn't qualify as bringing the drone down in a controlled fashion?
Because they wouldn't have stopped at one, they would have taken down another to prove they weren't full of shit. Who knows, maybe someone threw the proverbial Hail Mary pass and managed to spoof one into attempting a landing or just managed to get it to crash. I'm not totally discounting it, but I'm also not buying into this Mission: Impossible scenario either.
Because Iran has a long long history of making claims like this. Dear god, what are you some kind of Iranian fan boy?
How many drones do you think the U.S. had circling over Iran at the time they brought this one down? How many more do you think the U.S. had to send in and lose, one after another right behind it, before they realized there was a problem?
There is absolutely nothing implausible about the Iranian's story. I am convinced they brought it down just as they claim. Source: I am a telecommunications engineer, formerly of the U.S. Air Force.
It never occurred to you that the U.S. patched the vulnerability immediately, and continues to fly drone missions after that incdent if for no other reason than to make the Iranians' story seem less credible?
Well, I heard the sorceror who cast the spell which brought it down in the first place has been hard at work with his scribes, designing a special series of scrolls and incantations to unlock its powers. So...don't count the Iranians out just yet.
"Mother of all Bombs"...lol. How cute. The Tsar Bomba makes the MOAB look like a fuckin bitch.
Oh man, this is great.
UAS have some known, long term vulnerabilities that are intrinsic to UAS and cannot be "patched". There are ways some of them can be mitigated or minimized, but we're not talking about "patching a vulnerability" on a Linux host, here. I'm also not sure you're aware how long it takes to get ANY changes into operational ISR systems.
US war drones are much cheaper when they're made in China, so don't whine.
Iran's military has started to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone
What are they going to do with it, fly it over Texas?
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Curious that this news from zdnet http://www.zdnet.com.au/spy-drone-data-reveals-bin-laden-link-339336470.htm appears in news soon afterward. Are they analyzing it and cloning at the same time?
Probably be cheaper than what we pay the defense contractors. Though the service contract will be tricky.
I think that the US is trolling Iran with that drone, it probably has some kind of defect in it. I think its a ploy to get Iran to manufacture our drones. After they have a bunch we just execute a backdoor and have all the drones fly home :D
Why build expensive machinery yourself when you can have your enemy do it for you?
Smells like a Trojan Horse to me...besides by the time the Iranians/Chinese figured out how to reverse engineer this UAV, it will most likely be retired by the US and replaced with a newer design with better encryption. Besides, it would be questionable to use a reversed engineered UAV with deciphered code. If the US wrote the original code, I am sure the US would like an even opportunity to hack into the Iranian/Chinese code and do more than just commandeer their UAV and have it land at a US air base.
Using drones in Afghanistan and (almost friendly) Pakistan is ok, foes are a bunch of RPG equipped neanderthals, but using a very modern apparatus over a very unfriendly country that has high tech (via Chinese or Russians advisors) teams hungry for a kill is another story. The US is now advised that a unmanned recon (or bombing) fleet is quite unlikely the best solution to its 21st century military tactics. Think about another country taking control over a entire squadron of drones and hitting the country's armed forces or civilian targets.
That whole Iraq and Afghanistan war brought the manless surveillance concept to the top, the sole RQ incindent brings it back to scratch: It will not be possible to securely use those against serious futur threats. Fun's over!
Dear Iran,
We want our drone back, because it's our latest, coolest piece of tech [10 years ago]. In fact, it's so new, we didn't have time to properly obfuscate our compiled software, or take any other security measures. Please don't try copying our software, because it won't run on any systems you possess [for longer than it takes to copy itself all over your network, cause the heads on all your hard disks to crash into the platters, and overheat your RAM and CPU until they melt].
Signed,
U.S.A. [DoD/CIA]
They'll make two, and roll them down hills into each other.
You're convinced they brought it down just as they claim? You may know something that I don't, being that you're formerly of the Air Force, but it sounds kinda like bullshit to me.
In the shape of a little airplane...
Yes because Iran's copying of other technology like missiles, is going oh so well. Last I check they only county to fail more tests was NK.
Maybe they should just photoshop a drone together from the start and save themselves the effort.