There are two different scenarios that have to be discussed, and they are very different.
One is enterprise users...that's people at work, using Windows. For them, Admin rights are really not usually necessary, and there is someone else (the admins, obviously) who can serve in the admin role when needed. This is where the biggest bang for the buck of reducing user rights comes in. Yes, there's software that requires admin rights...but in the enterprise market that is becoming increasingly rare, and there are often ways to hit a middle ground where that software will run without giving full local admin rights to a user.
The other group is home users. This is the sticky wicket. Yes, there's UAC...but as home users aren't really that technically savvy. So, when something asks them to click (assuming Windows 10 here) "Yes" or "No," they will often just choose "Yes" because it's what they've had to do a hundred times before to make something valid work correctly. And that 101th time...it's malware. And sure, you could have them using an account with no admin rights at all, but then who would be their admin?
So, as you debate TFA and its message, keep these two scenarios in mind. They both have a lot of users in them, even the same users when you think about it...but they work in very, very different ways.
Byuu has more detailed knowledge of the hardware quirks and is able to get more accurate dumps because he understands how the memory is mapped at a low level. His custom rig has already found several bad dumps that previously thought to be good.
And yet...he was okay with these being shipped by US Postal Service? I guess intelligence, experience and common sense can be compartmentalized.
local administrative rights are needed by some software.
Well if need to have 2 laptops then I need 2 data cards with world wide data. Or is to ok use an hot spot for both?
This is less- and less-frequently true these days. More importantly, it's less-frequently true because companies are taking away admin rights, at which point they then notice which software is written this way. And in turn, that software often gets replaced by something that's better-written since it represents a security risk by confounding the business' need to properly control user access rights.
So...these people are angry that they were forced to give up, what...the iPhone 3? Whose cellular support tops out at 3G, which is barely even in existence any longer? Which didn't even have a forward-facing camera to do FaceTime in the first place? Which couldn't even do video in the first place?
These are small, battery powered devices. There is little that a "hacker" could do to hurt himself that he couldn't do better by sticking his tongue in a light socket.
Um.
So...on one hand, these are supposed to herald a bold new way of treating various disorders because its effects can be so powerful, but on the other hand, you couldn't possibly mess up and cause harm?
I don't think that kind of logic has ever been true, ever, about anything. Either it's inert or it's effective; inert has no upside or downside, while effective means it can be done incorrectly or abused, resulting in harm. Personally, I think the idea of zapping your own brain to alter your neurological functions is NOT a good idea from a "do-it-yourself" perspective. Some things are not suitable for unsupervised trial-and-error approaches.
As they say: if at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
I agree. A short cheap cable with an inline fuse could solve this problem. No reason to turn the function of a fuse into a fancy overpriced gadget.
No it couldn't.
USB-C is the standard that charges tiny little Bluetooth headsets and your MacBook. Same cable. It's also the standard that's supposed to be able to tell the difference between the big power supply for the MacBook and the little one that came with the Bluetooth headset, so that the MacBook knows that it's not going to get what it needs unless the big power supply is at the other end. Conversely, it also keeps the big power supply from totally detonating the Bluetooth headset.
The key to this technology is the ability for the cable and the devices at either end to essentially have a conversation about what's charging what. The problem here is when that conversation gets a bit garbled...and the capacity at one end and need at the other end are allowed to misalign, catastrophically. Sure, you could put a fuse inline to keep your Bluetooth headset from melting...but then you'd only be able to charge your Bluetooth headset with that cable. And the whole point of USB-C is about getting away from that paradigm.
"Stop being cheap and buy known certified products from official channels"
Please, there's plenty of UL/CE-listed crap out there where the second you take the power transformer apart you can find violations.
Certification means jack shit in this day and age.
No, there's plenty of devices that have a fraudulent UL/CE stamp on them out there...there's a difference. The difference is in where you get your devices from...and recognizing that just because it's a major retailer doesn't mean that you're necessarily getting good product.
Stop being cheap and buy known certified products from official channels in the first place, instead of cheaping out with items from Alibaba.
Exactly. I buy all my USB devices from Amazon, so I know I am safe.
Um.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm...because that's what this should be.
For example, a recent check of "Apple" chargers and cables on Amazon turned up that 90% of them were counterfeit...some of them dangerously made. And that seems all the more insane when you realize that there's only one Apple Computer, and yet Amazon doesn't seem to notice/check/even care about all the unsafe power adapters coming from a constellation of crappy little factories, when they could have a single unified stream coming direct from known Apple sites. Amazon does enough volume; they can do the homework and set that up.
I applaud you, Sir...for I was going to make some variant of the joke, but indeed your appeal to reason did work. Still, the temptation remains strong; it's hard to keep the respect for the office when the one who holds the office himself seems to lack such respect. But yeah...the higher road is like that, isn't it?
we don't know that, for all we know they were one of those mongodb databases that got cryptolocker-ed.
Except that you're describing it wrong. Cryptolocker has nothing to do with the over 20,000 MongoDB databases that have been subjected to ransom.
Here's what's happened...and may well be the case in this particular instance as well. MongoDB, by default, has no controls on being able to write, read, or even delete information. If you make the database accessible via the Internet, odds are you haven't fixed that default state..and that's exactly what's happened to tens of thousands of public-accessible MongoDB installations.
My argument is simple. A meter measures, nothing else (ignoring quantum physics). A device that controls the power in a house is not a meter. If such a device is called a meter is is incorrectly named, probably the handy work of a marketing department. Yes, I am being pedantic, but where I come from (New Zealand), smart meters are immune to the risk of property damage because they are meters and only meters.
Gee, that's swell...but you know these are real things we're talking about, being done by real people, yes? You don't get to just redefine the whole power grid to suit your ignorance of the industry because you could technically argue that something is no longer a "meter" because it has an on/off switch. Remote disconnect is an option on every major meter for sale today, and pretty much all of the minor ones as well...and it's an option that almost every meter in the field has because it's incredibly useful to the power company.
The problem is that they hit the wrong target. I don't blame them for wanting to block counterfeits, but they attacked people who had no way to know they were using a counterfeit. Basically, they mis-managed their channels to the point that a legit customer could make a good faith effort to buy the real thing at market price and still end up with fakes and no way to tell. FTDI had a way to tell but they wouldn't disclose it. Rather than fix their channels and help their direct customers to get the real thing, they punished people who had no idea what an FTDI was.
I see a bigger problem here. You've got a microcontroller that is ostensibly open-source hardware, but it's using a component from a company that most definitely swings hard in the other direction. Okay, so a USB-to-UART conversion option that is open-source hardware may not be available...but do you have to use one from a company that deliberately goes after clones in a way that punishes the innocent as collateral damage, too?
Time to put my pedantic hat on. A smart meter can not cause any damage as a meter is a device to measure, not modify or control. A quick Internet search suggests the word comes from the Greek word métron, to measure.
The devices being argued about are not smart meters, they are controllers. If you have a smart energy controller then I guess you may be at risk, but if like me, you have a smart meter then you can write code until the cows come home and still have zero effect on my power.
The devices being argued about actually are smart meters. One vendor cited...Sensus...doesn't even make "smart energy controllers." I don't know what you mean by that phrase, exactly...I assume you mean devices used for WAMPAC (Wide Area Monitoring, Protection And Control)...but Sensus does not manufacture anything that would fit the meaning of that phrase. Also, everything described here aligns with meters, not reclosers or synchrophasors or other WAMPAC-related devices.
What the "expert" has done here is taken the worst features of multiple meters, and put them together as though every meter is this way. And even then, he's overstating things...this "they can tell if you're home by how much electricity you're using!" bullshit has been around forever, and it's ridiculous.
Let's see, where to start. One, almost no meters use GSM. GSM is expensive on a per-device basis (the target upper limit for hardware costs is about $100/meter), poorly-supported by cellular providers...with future-state being no support at all...and renders the utility dependent upon an outside provider for all of their network backhaul from the meters. This is why, if you look at any of the major meter manufacturers (Itron, Elster, Landis + Gyr, etc.) you will find that they all use a very different architecture that does not at all rely on GSM, or any other cellular protocol. They use mesh networking and collectors.
Second...okay, let's talk about what you can do with the meters. Yes, theoretically (it's never been done), you can figure out if someone is home. You would need to be in their neighborhood to begin with since you have to speak directly with the meter. You would need to reverse engineer their specific approach to frequency agility, and break the crypto so that you could then impersonate the head-end and do meter data requests. With that, you could do data sampling to determine what normal peak and low usage numbers were, and from that you could derive whether or not they were probably home at any point in time. Or...you could simply walk near the house and see if the lights were on or there were less cars in the driveway/garage than usual. Which thieves already do, as a best practice that works pretty well.
Then, let's talk this "house fire" over "overload" bullshit. Meters do not regulate power. Let me say that again. METERS DO NOT REGULATE POWER. They can turn power on and off, and that is it. They cannot modulate voltage, wattage, frequency, or amperage. And while in the early days of AMI adoption it was feared that a compromised head-end (or impersonation thereof) could permit an attacker to issue enough remote disconnects to cause what's known as a "bulk load shedding event," it turns out that the meters and their communications networks are too slow. That network architecture I described above with collectors and mesh networks? Every approach in broad use acts as an inherent throttle on communications in bulk. So you couldn't even destabilize the grid; the effect would happen too slowly. And just as the attacker could turn the meters off, the utility could just turn them back on..so this would not be what you would consider a "blackout." They cleverly cite a house fire, though that was the result of a meter vendor changing the polymer used in the meter backing; the replacement polymer had the dual properties of 1, not being ablative (so it could catch fire) and 2, being more brittle...so if the meter wasn't seated the right way, it would crack. An arc would form eventually, setting the meter's base on fire...and there's your house fire. Nothing to do with hacking in the least.
This guy Rubin is a wanna-be with a new company, and he's decided to look at devices which are widely used without really learning about the industry they belong to, or getting the experience needed to know how all of this stuff really works in detail. He's not a widely-recognized "expert" in cyber security, neither in general nor within the power industry.
So my drone override transmitter that is already jamming GPS just needs to impersonate more than at least half the drones in range?
Along with all the local wifi hotspots, ssids, repeaters, device MAC addresses, etc. (including their spatial relationships to each other) that Google Maps just went ahead and logged. If I had to set this whole "out of sight flight" thing up that is one database that would get a lot of updates. People have put radio beacons everywhere, it would be a shame not to at least check in and say hello 60 times a day...
Also, he's confusing "jamming" with "impersonating." His "drone override transmitter" (whatever the fuck that is) can do one, or the other...but not both. And he should note that he'd need to be doing this across a LOT of spectrum...and eventually the FCC is going to find his ass as a result because as soon as GPS stops working, the drone shifts to other methods of navigating until it gets out of range of the jammer.
Did you read the patent? It only seems to describe what actions the drone would take, not how those actions would be carried out. Any idiot could say "the drone will detect a threat and move out of the way." The hand waving behind this patent is similar to a software patent - no meat behind *how* it is done. Here is a great line from the patent: "The imager 210(2) may detect objects, which may allow the UAV 102 to identify the objects." Maybe if they designed some very sensitive "imager" with a wide FOV that weighs nothing and uses very little power along with a processor to handle all of the data, then they would have an invention.
I think I'm going to file a patent on a device that creates power through nuclear fusion. I'll just copy/paste the Wikipedia article on the topic since that level of detail is apparently enough for the idiots at the Patent office. Then, when someone finally figures out how to do it I'll be rich!
Actually, it did describe how they would be carried out, in detail. I mean, it doesn't explain how a camera works, but at some point you have to assume that a person reading a patent application has some understanding of, well, you know...consumer-grade electronics.
It describes what it would use as points of reference, and in what way. It even goes into details as to the frequency bandwidth needed for some of those uses. It explains the circumstances under which certain sets of activities would take place and has flow charts...FLOW CHARTS...to illustrate the components needed, the actions taken, and the order in which it all would happen. I mean, what do you want...PCB plans and parts lists so that you can build your own? And I've never seen anything quite like this approach...it's brilliant.
I built a proof of concept and took down my drone that was flying at 150' in my yard. It was fun.
I'm pretty that a delivery drone can not out manuver a rocket propelled net dispersion system.
I don't know...it doesn't have to move much to accomplish it. How wide was your net, and did you hit a moving drone or one that was stationary above you? What was your angle to the drone...because if it's passing by a hundred feet or so to either side of you, it only needs to shift course away from your position a tiny bit to cause a miss. The drone doesn't need to suddenly be 30 feet from where it was at the moment you fire your net...I'm guessing it's got a solid 1-2 seconds...at least...to alter course enough to avoid. Of course, if not...then the fact that your device has almost no other uses is interesting. I find it hard to believe that it'd be difficult to outlaw "rocket-propelled net dispersion systems" as soon as they became the primary means of committing grand larceny of delivery drones.
Trust me...you're not smarter than Amazon's combined force of engineers, lawyers, and lobbyists.
Might be ok if someone open sourced it so it wouldn't lead to a power imbalance but killing people with drones is pretty problematic so even then it's not a good thing.
Think a bit Slashdot, nerds aren't for evil.
Unless they work for Microsoft.
Or the pay is really good.
Or it's just too cool.
So...did you even READ any of this? This is a patent application by Amazon, for their delivery drones. They aren't killing people, they're delivering consumer products. The threats that Amazon is counteracting are actually already accounted for in military drones; it's called SAASM, with regard to jamming/spoofing, and also called "flying really high" with regard to the whole bow and arrow threat. Nobody is looking at this as a way of killing people, and if you're worried about the possibility that drones will be used to kill people...well guess what, dude? Too late.
When I first read the OP, it didn't make sense. A drone being "confused" by a muzzle flash? What kind of idiot thinks that's how a drone navigates...or that a muzzle flash would be more confusing than light reflecting off a window or a pond? So I dug in...and the actual patent application is what you should really read because it's very cool. The article about the patent application itself is very poorly-written; either the author didn't really read the patent app or didn't understand it.
The underlying problem is this: people will screw with drones that are delivering valuable items. They will shoot at them with objects ranging from thrown stones to bullets from firearms. They will use signal jammers, spoofing of navigational or control systems and maybe even malware that compromises a device that's used to provide guidance. They've put together a pretty clever approach to each of these problems.
For kinetic threats, a system that would detect the attack would trigger one of a few possible reactions. One reaction is the emission of foam to cushion the drone from the direction of the threat. This would temporarily degrade its flight performance, but only on an as-needed basis. Another would be avoidance, if possible.
For (using the USAF definition) cyber threats, they get really clever. GPS is a nightmare against a moderately-capable attacker; spoofing and jamming are pretty much impossible to defend against. The current gold standard is a device called a SAASM...but there's a catch. It's only available to military users of GPS, and no commercial equivalent exists. It depends upon cryptographic keys to use the privileged GPS functions, so even if you could build your own you could not make use of it. And this is the other interesting/tricky threat.
So, you're humming along and minding your own business using GPS to navigate when...aha! Someone jams you. Or they spoof GPS and try to get you to crash into the ground so that they can take your goodies. You will notice one of these happening when you suddenly lose GPS signal...and the other when your speed and course suddenly vary wildly without you having done anything to cause such.
Amazon has put together a really smart mutli-layered approach to this kind of threat. I won't dig into the details, but some of the goodies include mesh networking, using a variety of alternate methods as points of reference (including even the signal jammer itself, if jamming is going on) and a broad range of different frequencies so that all-encompassing jamming or spoofing becomes a serious, serious pain in the ass for the attacker to accomplish.
Slashdot Mirror
Original submission: Brianna Wu Is a Harsh Mistress.
You stripped this brilliant title and wrote in your blurb that spans two lines!
Objection! "Mistress" is a gender-definitive word created by the Patriarchy and favored by cis-gend...*chuckle*...CIS-gender...*laughing*
I couldn't get through it with a straight face. How do these SJWs manage to say all this stuff without laughing their asses off?
Context here:
There are two different scenarios that have to be discussed, and they are very different.
One is enterprise users...that's people at work, using Windows. For them, Admin rights are really not usually necessary, and there is someone else (the admins, obviously) who can serve in the admin role when needed. This is where the biggest bang for the buck of reducing user rights comes in. Yes, there's software that requires admin rights...but in the enterprise market that is becoming increasingly rare, and there are often ways to hit a middle ground where that software will run without giving full local admin rights to a user.
The other group is home users. This is the sticky wicket. Yes, there's UAC...but as home users aren't really that technically savvy. So, when something asks them to click (assuming Windows 10 here) "Yes" or "No," they will often just choose "Yes" because it's what they've had to do a hundred times before to make something valid work correctly. And that 101th time...it's malware. And sure, you could have them using an account with no admin rights at all, but then who would be their admin?
So, as you debate TFA and its message, keep these two scenarios in mind. They both have a lot of users in them, even the same users when you think about it...but they work in very, very different ways.
Byuu has more detailed knowledge of the hardware quirks and is able to get more accurate dumps because he understands how the memory is mapped at a low level. His custom rig has already found several bad dumps that previously thought to be good.
And yet...he was okay with these being shipped by US Postal Service? I guess intelligence, experience and common sense can be compartmentalized.
local administrative rights are needed by some software.
Well if need to have 2 laptops then I need 2 data cards with world wide data. Or is to ok use an hot spot for both?
This is less- and less-frequently true these days. More importantly, it's less-frequently true because companies are taking away admin rights, at which point they then notice which software is written this way. And in turn, that software often gets replaced by something that's better-written since it represents a security risk by confounding the business' need to properly control user access rights.
There are still 500 Best Buy stores in the US?
So...these people are angry that they were forced to give up, what...the iPhone 3? Whose cellular support tops out at 3G, which is barely even in existence any longer? Which didn't even have a forward-facing camera to do FaceTime in the first place? Which couldn't even do video in the first place?
University of Utah students who were volunteering to test the new glasses were reported as saying:
"Wow...I can read so much more clearly no...wait, what? Holy shit...the Book of Mormon says WHAT?"
These are small, battery powered devices. There is little that a "hacker" could do to hurt himself that he couldn't do better by sticking his tongue in a light socket.
Um.
So...on one hand, these are supposed to herald a bold new way of treating various disorders because its effects can be so powerful, but on the other hand, you couldn't possibly mess up and cause harm?
I don't think that kind of logic has ever been true, ever, about anything. Either it's inert or it's effective; inert has no upside or downside, while effective means it can be done incorrectly or abused, resulting in harm. Personally, I think the idea of zapping your own brain to alter your neurological functions is NOT a good idea from a "do-it-yourself" perspective. Some things are not suitable for unsupervised trial-and-error approaches.
As they say: if at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
I agree. A short cheap cable with an inline fuse could solve this problem. No reason to turn the function of a fuse into a fancy overpriced gadget.
No it couldn't.
USB-C is the standard that charges tiny little Bluetooth headsets and your MacBook. Same cable. It's also the standard that's supposed to be able to tell the difference between the big power supply for the MacBook and the little one that came with the Bluetooth headset, so that the MacBook knows that it's not going to get what it needs unless the big power supply is at the other end. Conversely, it also keeps the big power supply from totally detonating the Bluetooth headset.
The key to this technology is the ability for the cable and the devices at either end to essentially have a conversation about what's charging what. The problem here is when that conversation gets a bit garbled...and the capacity at one end and need at the other end are allowed to misalign, catastrophically. Sure, you could put a fuse inline to keep your Bluetooth headset from melting...but then you'd only be able to charge your Bluetooth headset with that cable. And the whole point of USB-C is about getting away from that paradigm.
"Stop being cheap and buy known certified products from official channels"
Please, there's plenty of UL/CE-listed crap out there where the second you take the power transformer apart you can find violations.
Certification means jack shit in this day and age.
No, there's plenty of devices that have a fraudulent UL/CE stamp on them out there...there's a difference. The difference is in where you get your devices from...and recognizing that just because it's a major retailer doesn't mean that you're necessarily getting good product.
Stop being cheap and buy known certified products from official channels in the first place, instead of cheaping out with items from Alibaba.
Exactly. I buy all my USB devices from Amazon, so I know I am safe.
Um.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm...because that's what this should be.
For example, a recent check of "Apple" chargers and cables on Amazon turned up that 90% of them were counterfeit...some of them dangerously made. And that seems all the more insane when you realize that there's only one Apple Computer, and yet Amazon doesn't seem to notice/check/even care about all the unsafe power adapters coming from a constellation of crappy little factories, when they could have a single unified stream coming direct from known Apple sites. Amazon does enough volume; they can do the homework and set that up.
The human/pig has been around for a while now, and even has her own tv show. Here's what she looks like now.
Show respect for the office.
I applaud you, Sir...for I was going to make some variant of the joke, but indeed your appeal to reason did work. Still, the temptation remains strong; it's hard to keep the respect for the office when the one who holds the office himself seems to lack such respect. But yeah...the higher road is like that, isn't it?
Bravo, Sir, bravo!
It was Robert DeNiro, I just know it. He got one of the employees from the dot-com startup he interned at to do it for him. :)
we don't know that, for all we know they were one of those mongodb databases that got cryptolocker-ed.
Except that you're describing it wrong. Cryptolocker has nothing to do with the over 20,000 MongoDB databases that have been subjected to ransom.
Here's what's happened...and may well be the case in this particular instance as well. MongoDB, by default, has no controls on being able to write, read, or even delete information. If you make the database accessible via the Internet, odds are you haven't fixed that default state..and that's exactly what's happened to tens of thousands of public-accessible MongoDB installations.
Krebs on Security has an excellent writeup here: https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...
My argument is simple. A meter measures, nothing else (ignoring quantum physics). A device that controls the power in a house is not a meter. If such a device is called a meter is is incorrectly named, probably the handy work of a marketing department. Yes, I am being pedantic, but where I come from (New Zealand), smart meters are immune to the risk of property damage because they are meters and only meters.
Gee, that's swell...but you know these are real things we're talking about, being done by real people, yes? You don't get to just redefine the whole power grid to suit your ignorance of the industry because you could technically argue that something is no longer a "meter" because it has an on/off switch. Remote disconnect is an option on every major meter for sale today, and pretty much all of the minor ones as well...and it's an option that almost every meter in the field has because it's incredibly useful to the power company.
The problem is that they hit the wrong target. I don't blame them for wanting to block counterfeits, but they attacked people who had no way to know they were using a counterfeit. Basically, they mis-managed their channels to the point that a legit customer could make a good faith effort to buy the real thing at market price and still end up with fakes and no way to tell. FTDI had a way to tell but they wouldn't disclose it. Rather than fix their channels and help their direct customers to get the real thing, they punished people who had no idea what an FTDI was.
I see a bigger problem here. You've got a microcontroller that is ostensibly open-source hardware, but it's using a component from a company that most definitely swings hard in the other direction. Okay, so a USB-to-UART conversion option that is open-source hardware may not be available...but do you have to use one from a company that deliberately goes after clones in a way that punishes the innocent as collateral damage, too?
...shit Alex Jones would doubt
There is not likely to be any conspiracy that Jones would doubt. In fact, he was one of the main promoters of the fabricated conspiracy.
There are shitloads of conspiracies that Alex Jones would doubt. Let me cite a few:
1, anything that makes Donald Trump look bad.
2, anything that makes Donald Trump's opposition look good.
3, anything that hurts his own image.
Time to put my pedantic hat on. A smart meter can not cause any damage as a meter is a device to measure, not modify or control. A quick Internet search suggests the word comes from the Greek word métron, to measure.
The devices being argued about are not smart meters, they are controllers. If you have a smart energy controller then I guess you may be at risk, but if like me, you have a smart meter then you can write code until the cows come home and still have zero effect on my power.
The devices being argued about actually are smart meters. One vendor cited...Sensus...doesn't even make "smart energy controllers." I don't know what you mean by that phrase, exactly...I assume you mean devices used for WAMPAC (Wide Area Monitoring, Protection And Control)...but Sensus does not manufacture anything that would fit the meaning of that phrase. Also, everything described here aligns with meters, not reclosers or synchrophasors or other WAMPAC-related devices.
What the "expert" has done here is taken the worst features of multiple meters, and put them together as though every meter is this way. And even then, he's overstating things...this "they can tell if you're home by how much electricity you're using!" bullshit has been around forever, and it's ridiculous.
Let's see, where to start. One, almost no meters use GSM. GSM is expensive on a per-device basis (the target upper limit for hardware costs is about $100/meter), poorly-supported by cellular providers...with future-state being no support at all...and renders the utility dependent upon an outside provider for all of their network backhaul from the meters. This is why, if you look at any of the major meter manufacturers (Itron, Elster, Landis + Gyr, etc.) you will find that they all use a very different architecture that does not at all rely on GSM, or any other cellular protocol. They use mesh networking and collectors.
Second...okay, let's talk about what you can do with the meters. Yes, theoretically (it's never been done), you can figure out if someone is home. You would need to be in their neighborhood to begin with since you have to speak directly with the meter. You would need to reverse engineer their specific approach to frequency agility, and break the crypto so that you could then impersonate the head-end and do meter data requests. With that, you could do data sampling to determine what normal peak and low usage numbers were, and from that you could derive whether or not they were probably home at any point in time. Or...you could simply walk near the house and see if the lights were on or there were less cars in the driveway/garage than usual. Which thieves already do, as a best practice that works pretty well.
Then, let's talk this "house fire" over "overload" bullshit. Meters do not regulate power. Let me say that again. METERS DO NOT REGULATE POWER. They can turn power on and off, and that is it. They cannot modulate voltage, wattage, frequency, or amperage. And while in the early days of AMI adoption it was feared that a compromised head-end (or impersonation thereof) could permit an attacker to issue enough remote disconnects to cause what's known as a "bulk load shedding event," it turns out that the meters and their communications networks are too slow. That network architecture I described above with collectors and mesh networks? Every approach in broad use acts as an inherent throttle on communications in bulk. So you couldn't even destabilize the grid; the effect would happen too slowly. And just as the attacker could turn the meters off, the utility could just turn them back on..so this would not be what you would consider a "blackout." They cleverly cite a house fire, though that was the result of a meter vendor changing the polymer used in the meter backing; the replacement polymer had the dual properties of 1, not being ablative (so it could catch fire) and 2, being more brittle...so if the meter wasn't seated the right way, it would crack. An arc would form eventually, setting the meter's base on fire...and there's your house fire. Nothing to do with hacking in the least.
This guy Rubin is a wanna-be with a new company, and he's decided to look at devices which are widely used without really learning about the industry they belong to, or getting the experience needed to know how all of this stuff really works in detail. He's not a widely-recognized "expert" in cyber security, neither in general nor within the power industry.
So my drone override transmitter that is already jamming GPS just needs to impersonate more than at least half the drones in range?
Along with all the local wifi hotspots, ssids, repeaters, device MAC addresses, etc. (including their spatial relationships to each other) that Google Maps just went ahead and logged. If I had to set this whole "out of sight flight" thing up that is one database that would get a lot of updates. People have put radio beacons everywhere, it would be a shame not to at least check in and say hello 60 times a day...
Also, he's confusing "jamming" with "impersonating." His "drone override transmitter" (whatever the fuck that is) can do one, or the other...but not both. And he should note that he'd need to be doing this across a LOT of spectrum...and eventually the FCC is going to find his ass as a result because as soon as GPS stops working, the drone shifts to other methods of navigating until it gets out of range of the jammer.
Did you read the patent? It only seems to describe what actions the drone would take, not how those actions would be carried out. Any idiot could say "the drone will detect a threat and move out of the way." The hand waving behind this patent is similar to a software patent - no meat behind *how* it is done. Here is a great line from the patent: "The imager 210(2) may detect objects, which may allow the UAV 102 to identify the objects." Maybe if they designed some very sensitive "imager" with a wide FOV that weighs nothing and uses very little power along with a processor to handle all of the data, then they would have an invention.
I think I'm going to file a patent on a device that creates power through nuclear fusion. I'll just copy/paste the Wikipedia article on the topic since that level of detail is apparently enough for the idiots at the Patent office. Then, when someone finally figures out how to do it I'll be rich!
Actually, it did describe how they would be carried out, in detail. I mean, it doesn't explain how a camera works, but at some point you have to assume that a person reading a patent application has some understanding of, well, you know...consumer-grade electronics.
It describes what it would use as points of reference, and in what way. It even goes into details as to the frequency bandwidth needed for some of those uses. It explains the circumstances under which certain sets of activities would take place and has flow charts...FLOW CHARTS...to illustrate the components needed, the actions taken, and the order in which it all would happen. I mean, what do you want...PCB plans and parts lists so that you can build your own? And I've never seen anything quite like this approach...it's brilliant.
I built a proof of concept and took down my drone that was flying at 150' in my yard. It was fun.
I'm pretty that a delivery drone can not out manuver a rocket propelled net dispersion system.
I don't know...it doesn't have to move much to accomplish it. How wide was your net, and did you hit a moving drone or one that was stationary above you? What was your angle to the drone...because if it's passing by a hundred feet or so to either side of you, it only needs to shift course away from your position a tiny bit to cause a miss. The drone doesn't need to suddenly be 30 feet from where it was at the moment you fire your net...I'm guessing it's got a solid 1-2 seconds...at least...to alter course enough to avoid. Of course, if not...then the fact that your device has almost no other uses is interesting. I find it hard to believe that it'd be difficult to outlaw "rocket-propelled net dispersion systems" as soon as they became the primary means of committing grand larceny of delivery drones.
Trust me...you're not smarter than Amazon's combined force of engineers, lawyers, and lobbyists.
Maybe thinking about this is a bad thing.
Might be ok if someone open sourced it so it wouldn't lead to a power imbalance but killing people with drones is pretty problematic so even then it's not a good thing.
Think a bit Slashdot, nerds aren't for evil.
Unless they work for Microsoft.
Or the pay is really good.
Or it's just too cool.
So...did you even READ any of this? This is a patent application by Amazon, for their delivery drones. They aren't killing people, they're delivering consumer products. The threats that Amazon is counteracting are actually already accounted for in military drones; it's called SAASM, with regard to jamming/spoofing, and also called "flying really high" with regard to the whole bow and arrow threat. Nobody is looking at this as a way of killing people, and if you're worried about the possibility that drones will be used to kill people...well guess what, dude? Too late.
When I first read the OP, it didn't make sense. A drone being "confused" by a muzzle flash? What kind of idiot thinks that's how a drone navigates...or that a muzzle flash would be more confusing than light reflecting off a window or a pond? So I dug in...and the actual patent application is what you should really read because it's very cool. The article about the patent application itself is very poorly-written; either the author didn't really read the patent app or didn't understand it.
The underlying problem is this: people will screw with drones that are delivering valuable items. They will shoot at them with objects ranging from thrown stones to bullets from firearms. They will use signal jammers, spoofing of navigational or control systems and maybe even malware that compromises a device that's used to provide guidance. They've put together a pretty clever approach to each of these problems.
For kinetic threats, a system that would detect the attack would trigger one of a few possible reactions. One reaction is the emission of foam to cushion the drone from the direction of the threat. This would temporarily degrade its flight performance, but only on an as-needed basis. Another would be avoidance, if possible.
For (using the USAF definition) cyber threats, they get really clever. GPS is a nightmare against a moderately-capable attacker; spoofing and jamming are pretty much impossible to defend against. The current gold standard is a device called a SAASM...but there's a catch. It's only available to military users of GPS, and no commercial equivalent exists. It depends upon cryptographic keys to use the privileged GPS functions, so even if you could build your own you could not make use of it. And this is the other interesting/tricky threat.
So, you're humming along and minding your own business using GPS to navigate when...aha! Someone jams you. Or they spoof GPS and try to get you to crash into the ground so that they can take your goodies. You will notice one of these happening when you suddenly lose GPS signal...and the other when your speed and course suddenly vary wildly without you having done anything to cause such.
Amazon has put together a really smart mutli-layered approach to this kind of threat. I won't dig into the details, but some of the goodies include mesh networking, using a variety of alternate methods as points of reference (including even the signal jammer itself, if jamming is going on) and a broad range of different frequencies so that all-encompassing jamming or spoofing becomes a serious, serious pain in the ass for the attacker to accomplish.