Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

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Lemon law

Lifer
Nov 6, 2005
20,984
3
0
In my mind, this whole drone video feed stealing shows two things.

1. Who ever designed the systems were retarded to not encrypt that video feeds. And now us tax payers will spend millions and perhaps billions to fix their screw ups.

2. Once encryption methods are properly implemented, even if new drones so equipped are intercepted, it should not cost much to swap in new encryption chips to the whole fleet of drones. I disagree with any who say we need to use the best available US encryption techniques, when changing encryption techniques will be enough to stay well ahead of an increasing sophisticated enemy.

3. We also have to question the value of using drones as offensive weapons in an international war on terrorism. Yes they are nice because no US personnel are risked, yes they do inspire fear in the enemy, but sadly, the human animal is very stubborn and the will to resist is an even stronger emotion than fear. And what good are drones when our experience in their use only shows their use creates more terrorists than we kill.
 

cwjerome

Diamond Member
Sep 30, 2004
4,346
26
81
Each unit will have to be taken out of service.
Install some hew hardware & software
Retested.

Then the people on the ground will have to have new updated equipment issued that will handle the encryption.

It will be more expensive also if the ground units have to handle both conditions until ALL airborne units are retrofitted. The ground units will either have to carry two systems or the modified system has to support both types

Time and money.

Such does not jive with the philosophy of getting it out the door on the original contract price and deadlines.

This has exposed a flaw that people knew and wanted to bury because of pressures. The low risk was not compatible with the extra cost.

It's not as complicated as you make it seem, and it's already under way. You don't even have to do with all units. The whole thing is vastly overstated to make people's lips quiver.

DOD and everyone who was a part of fielding these systems knows all about crypto. But there are a host of issues, such as interoperability, cost, weight, key management, and others. These are all problems that have solutions, but encryption wasn't present for a reason: it was a risk/reward trade-off and in this case the "risk" is now apparent... yet still minimal.

First, when you know an enemy as a certain ability, it opens up a new range of countermeasures... which are often cheap, easy, and basically make the enemy wish they never had the capability. It creates some interesting possibilities for deception operations. Assuming for a second that any of these people had the skills to understand the data they are seeing and able to conceptualize the terrain and movements from a birds eye view, why not use decoys?

Or, when their little box starts receiving, the might have 20 minutes to find a good hiding spot. Then all we have to do is fly false alarms and keep them running for cover until they become desensitized to their own alerts. The point is, there are a hundred things to consider that 99% of the public does not, so the "public" reaction means little to me.

It's easy to say it would have been smart to write in some form of basic encryption into the contracts... but then I'm not an acquisition guru. What I can say with some certainty is that when these systems were being developed and used for the first time in the mid to late 90s, they were very simple and the "risks" were known. The Pentagon relied on security through obscurity and assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it. If/when things change, then we change. That's why there are always new variants of equipment (F-16A-E, etc) because we grow, learn, and add newer/better stuff when necessary. Now could be one of those times... but this whole "story" reeks of sensationalism.
 

aphex

Moderator<br>All Things Apple
Moderator
Jul 19, 2001
38,572
2
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Obummer!

(Next time they might want to try some encryption)

Might want to get off your Obama hate wagon for just two seconds to notice 'U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year'
 

Wheezer

Diamond Member
Nov 2, 1999
6,731
1
81
from the comments section of the article and also posted in the OT thread:

As an Army Infantryman that has worked with JTACs and UAVs, I think I can shed a little light on this
situation.

First off, let me say that this is not the military's primary airborne surveillance system. An insurgent can't point a little satellite dish at an Apache/A-10/AC-130 and see what that pilot is seeing.

When a pilot or UAV transfers data to one of these ROVER consoles, THAT data is unencrypted. This may seem like a serious security risk, but it really isn't. These consoles are primarily used at the tactical level. That means that my platoon is down the street from some bad guys in a house and we are using this thing to get surveillance on them. Usually what follows is a call for fire to have them destroyed. If an insurgent were watching this feed, he would probably not have enough time to get up and run away before being killed.

I would much rather use an unencrypted video feed of a target for recon than a squad of soldiers. I don't care if everyone with DirecTV can see what I'm seeing. Again, this is a tactical asset. These aren't the same feeds that are being sent to the Pentagon.

Why don't they just encrypt it anyway?

Encryption would add serious weight to these consoles. In Afghanistan, your typical soldier or Marine is probably already humping about 100 pounds of gear.

Encrypting these streams would also cause compatibility issues. Every aircraft and UAV would have to have the same encryption data as the ROVER consoles to be effective. It is hard enough to get a few encrypted radios to talk to each other. I can't imagine how hard it would be to synchronize aircraft with thousands of video consoles.
 

Modelworks

Lifer
Feb 22, 2007
16,240
7
76
In my mind, this whole drone video feed stealing shows two things.

1. Who ever designed the systems were retarded to not encrypt that video feeds. And now us tax payers will spend millions and perhaps billions to fix their screw ups.


Here is an email I got from a friend who works in DOD.
They are not looking at the technology of the time when they were put into use. We could not have implemented the encryption in the field with what people are saying we should have had. The fastest processor we had to work with at the time these went into design was a pentium running at about 150Mhz. The fastest encryption cpu was the Sun sparc or Alpha Dec. The idea was to worry about encryption in the control system and not what the drone sends back . Doing more than that would have added a lot of weight to the system making it unworkable. It took a computer the size of three tower systems just to encrypt the controls then. To add that kind of encryption to the drones for just the video feed would have been unworkable. The cost to add it to each field monitor that now receives predator video would have cost hundreds of millions.

Adding it now is less costly , but the system worked for so long so well that the idea of spending more money on encrypting the video wasn't discussed. It will be added now through software mechanisms but it will not be an overnight process and we still need some systems in the field to see the video and they are not capable of decoding encrypted streams. So it looks like we will do a half/half implementation. Some video will get encrypted, some won't.

All those criticizing us need to know that we work really hard on these designs , if we had our way and unlimited budgets we would have the things working like something out of the transformers !