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DARPA Funds a $300 Software-Defined Radio For Hackers
Sparrowvsrevolution writes with this story from Forbes: "Over the weekend at the ToorCon hacker conference in San Diego, Michael Ossmann of Great Scott Gadgets revealed a beta version of the HackRF Jawbreaker, the latest model of the wireless Swiss-army knife tools known as 'software-defined radios.' Like any software-defined radio, the HackRF can shift between different frequencies as easily as a computer switches between applications–It can both read and transmit signals from 100 megahertz to 6 gigahertz, intercepting or reproducing frequencies used by everything from FM radios to police communications to garage door openers to WiFi and GSM to next-generation air traffic control system messages. At Ossmann's target price of $300, the versatile, open-source devices would cost less than half as much as currently existing software-defined radios with the same capabilities. And to fund the beta testing phase of HackRF, the Department of Defense research arm known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pitched in $200,000 last February as part of its Cyber Fast Track program."
Antenna design for this must be miserable...
Anyone know if there is a good way to have relatively optimized reception over that whole spectrum without having to swap your antennas when changing frequencies?
- Toast
First post?
Software radios are becoming more popular in the amateur radio community. There are several manufacturers of very fine radios and quite a few build-it-yourself radios available too. I'll be watching this with great interest since one of the biggest problems with the lower-cost software radios is band coverage.
As Toast said a moment ago, antenna selection would be hard. Most radio amateurs would use an antenna tuner and/or a multiband antenna for the HF frequencies and an antenna switch for other bands of interest. I do just that. I have a 40 meter full wave horizontal loop antenna and use an antenna tuner and a 4:1 balun and can transmit on all bands from 40m through 10m and have very good results. It's also usable on 6m, but have never had a lot of luck with any kind of distant contacts.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I don't know why DARPA would necessarily feel the need to contribute to work in an area that is already receiving attention(The guys at Ettus will sell you a competent little package for under $2k, sometimes rather far under, depending on the frequency ranges you want, which is hardly free; but isn't exactly "If you have to ask, you may be in the wrong store." money); but I'd imagine that whatever sub-unit of DARPA made the decision is the sub-unit where people who realize that 'obscurity' ain't gonna cut it as a security strategy in the future hang out.
While, yes, the US Intelligence Community certainly wet-dreams about a world of full spectrum dominance and Total Information Awareness, anyone who hasn't fully removed themselves from empiricism has to admit that that isn't really on the table. Especially for assorted hacker shenanigans, there are just too many parties who can drum up enough nerds to at least go after soft targets.
In such an environment, the US(as a country deeply dependent on complex electronic infrastructure) is probably better off if friendly security researchers have cheap toys to work with, at the risk that enemy ones will as well, rather than a situation where friendly security researchers find that the tools they need are expensive or illicit; but anybody doing work for even fairly cruddy little nation-states has what they need to pump out the zero-days.
The point is that you've always been able to do that. Radio hams have been building radios and you've been able to buy scanners that will let you listen and transmit on any frequency you like for decades.
That's part of the article summary - people STILL using "security by obscurity" because they don't expect people to bother to record, modify and playback openly-available data is LUDICROUS. See the article just now about being able to scam public transport because of homebrew-encryption used over the airwaves.
The problem is not the airwaves, or the devices available to read them. They've existed since Marconi, if you had the brains. It's that people still deploy systems where the wireless part is treated like some mystical, magical medium that stops people doing things to it.
You can already listen to GSM. Radio hams found and cracked the encryption on it before it was even standardised. 3G technologies have similar problems. DECT, also. Smart-meters, some of them too. The problem is relying on untested encryption or no encryption/authentication at all in order to make things work and then being shocked when someone clones your phone.
This is nothing new. It just makes it slightly cheaper and more convenient.
If you have SDR equipment that can operate on 2.4GHz and has enough bandwidth, you could operate WiFi, ZigBee, and other protocols at the same time. You could have WiFi on channel 1, ZigBee on 11, etc. As long as the chipping codes don't collide, you can go nuts. As an example of relatively simple SDRs, check out these Web SDRs. These are single radios that digitize large swaths of spectrum. Each web user gets their own software virtual receiver that is tunable across the sampled spectrum. These radios can support hundreds of users at the same time, each listening to different freqs in different modes.
The radio hardware remains the same. The parts that can change are external to the actual 'radio' part - preselector filters, preamps, antennas, etc. Once you get the signal of interest to the radio, the processing is identical. Look around for descriptions of I/Q modulation - by supplying in-phase and quadrature signals, you can generate any modulation you want.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.