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?

Comments

Like DRM?

[Matt_H]

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?

Re:Like DRM?

[ShanghaiBill]

Your servers with the pads will get Pwned so fast it will make your head spin.

Indeed. We have already had American soldiers kill other American soldiers because they objected to our wars. It would be much less risky to leak the pads to our enemies, or use the pads to wipe out all our weapons. How would the "destruct" signal work anyway? It would need to be a radio signal, which means an antenna and battery on each weapon. So when the enemy captures the weapons, the first thing they would do was break off the antenna and take out the battery. Anyone who thinks we can send out the destruct signal before they could do that has clearly never dealt with the military bureaucracy's decision making process.

When I was in the Marines, we had a much simpler solution: Thermite grenades. Every artillery battery, and every tank platoon had them. If equipment ever had to be abandoned, we were trained to toss a thermite grenade into the breech of each weapon, and to place another grenade on the engine block. If the Iraqi Army was too incompetent to do this when they were overrun by ISIS, then they never should have been entrusted with the weapons in the first place.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Silly

[TheRaven64]

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.

Here's an idea

[damn_registrars]

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.

Easiest "Fix"

[Dracos]

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.