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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?
"pirated" is not the verb you want there, it's "stolen". To equate piracy with theft is purely political and thus retarded and dilutes the meaning of both words.
I am reminded of Asimov's story "The Mayors," in Foundation (first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1942, in which an "ultrawave relay" disables the warship that the Foundation sold to the Anacreonian navy when the Anacreons try to use it against them.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
If I were a soldier for the US military or the legitimate owner of the equipment that I'm trying to use, I would be concerned that something would disable the equipment at exactly the wrong time, or that I couldn't use it when I needed it because of some snafu.
.50 cal, or not his M72, or not his M60. They need to all be able to use any, and to use the military's organizational structure itself as the safety measure.
Humvees, tanks, planes, helicopters, even ATVs don't even have keys because when it's time to use it, you don't want to be fighting with the equipment itself, and trying to track down a key, or to enter a passcode, or to do other such things could mean the difference between life and death. Given how harsh a warzone can be to the equipment in the first place, there's no good reason to push your luck by adding more ways to disable stuff.
And you can't use something like personal credentials either, for many electronics, because you don't know who will end up using it. If two companies taking a break together are attacked, every man grabs whatever can to defend, even if it's not his humvee's
As for Iraq, I don't think they'll survive as a country for the next decade. They're bickering about who's in charge when the enemy is literally at the city gates. The Kurds will declare independence and are probably better equipped to fight ISIS than the official central government, and the Shia/Sunni divide will become more pronounced. That's the thing when removing strong-men from power, the power-vacuum is vast and simply wasn't well-enough accounted for, and the middle-east will be paying for that for a long, long time.
This is what he meant when he said, "never get involved in a land war in Asia".
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
And Abdel Majed Abdel Bary is British. So the conclusion is obvious... ;)
"Margaret Thatcher forced François Mitterrand to give her the codes to disable Argentina's deadly French-made missiles during the Falklands war"
Bologna.
I've seen the insides of 70's era AM39 Exocet. They don't have codes. They certainly don't have remote turn-off codes.
And then there's the fact that they worked perfectly. Six (five AMs, one SM) launches, four hits. Two sinkings. Much better results than anyone could have predicted.