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Could Tech Have Stopped ISIS From Using Our Own Heavy Weapons Against Us?
JonZittrain writes: This summer, ISIS insurgents captured Mosul — with with it, three divisions' worth of advanced American military hardware. After ISIS used it to capture the Mosul Dam, the U.S. started bombing its own pirated equipment. Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?
We already require extra authentication at a distance to arm nuclear weapons, and last season's 24 notwithstanding, we routinely operate military drones at a distance. Reportedly in the Falkland Islands war, Margaret Thatcher was able to extract codes to disable Argentina's Exocet missiles from the French. The simplest implementation might be like the proposal for land mines that expire after a certain time. Perhaps tanks — currently usable without even an ignition key — could require a renewal code digitally signed by the owning country to be entered manually or received by satellite every six months or so.
I'm a skeptic of kill switches, especially in consumer devices, but still found myself writing up the case for a way to disable military hardware in the field. There are lots of reasons it might not work — or work too well — but is there a way to improve on what we face now?
We already require extra authentication at a distance to arm nuclear weapons, and last season's 24 notwithstanding, we routinely operate military drones at a distance. Reportedly in the Falkland Islands war, Margaret Thatcher was able to extract codes to disable Argentina's Exocet missiles from the French. The simplest implementation might be like the proposal for land mines that expire after a certain time. Perhaps tanks — currently usable without even an ignition key — could require a renewal code digitally signed by the owning country to be entered manually or received by satellite every six months or so.
I'm a skeptic of kill switches, especially in consumer devices, but still found myself writing up the case for a way to disable military hardware in the field. There are lots of reasons it might not work — or work too well — but is there a way to improve on what we face now?
As desirable as it would be in the case if ISIS, wouldn't implementing such kill switches on weapons be as ineffective as DRM for copyrighted material, with undesirable side-effects for "legitimate uses" and plenty of workarounds for "illegitimate" users?
Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?
No. Next question.
Any system that's trusted to grant or revoke capabilities must have done way to be authenticated. Any authentication system can be faked with sufficient knowledge. You can control how difficult faking the system can be, or how much knowledge is needed. But it cannot be eliminated.
Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?
So what the enemy needs to do to win is to get disable codes?
Given Pentagon's contractor efficiency and reporting requirements, the choices will probably be in a plaintext file accessible from the internet, in a budget report.
The idea is to have a timer that would automatically disable the equipment unless it received an enable signal, either from a satellite or removable medium. It's possible to make such a system that is, at the very least, very difficult to tamper with. Many of the systems on tanks and so on are computer controlled and if the computers stop working then it's a lot less valuable. The goal of such systems is similar to that of crypto: it's not to prevent the enemy from ever using the tanks that they've stolen, it's to prevent them using them quickly. If you have a few weeks to bomb the stolen equipment before it can be used, and the enemy has to invest a lot of high-tech resources into cracking the systems, then that's probably good enough.
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I assumed it was like how pirates would steal ships, and then use them.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
How about we just stop invading other countries where we know people don't like to see Americans? If we had opted out of the second Iraq war, we could have saved thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and our own collective faces on the international stage. To top it all off we wouldn't need to be having this discussion at all. We didn't accomplish anything with that war.
I know that is not a popular opinion here, but it is the truth.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Bring it all back home. For all the hullabaloo about letting technology getting into "enemy hands", including export restrictions, the "let's just leave a bunch of military hardware in the Middle East" scenario was apparently never considered a risk.
Of course, it's too late now for the Mosul equipment, but the same thing could happen anywhere else in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It's almost as if the belligerent, short-sighted idiots are still in charge.
Would you want a weapon that would only work if someone else said it was okay to use? It's been tried before but it does not work. BTW, did Thatcher herself figure the codes out? and disable them? I think that credit goes to good British Engineers and not to some politician.