DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: kimba1 on December 13, 2011, 11:51:32 AM
-
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/13/us-drone-crashes-in-seychelles/ (http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/13/us-drone-crashes-in-seychelles/)
The very best politics is will tell you to spend on.
-
This is something to consider in the case with Iran.
A certain number of drones have fallen due to accident or mechanical failure, this could have been the case with the one in Iran.
If a drone fell down strictly due to luck , would they claim to have shot it or to have wrested controll of it?
I think they would , but it may be a while before we actually know.
-
Military/technical question....
Wouldn't these drones have either a
a) self destruct load
b) locator beacon to give precise location, in the event it went down (& for needed laser guided bomb, or GPS guided Tomohawk missle strike??)
c) and do we not have military satellites with imaging computers that could pinpoint one of these being parked out in broad daylight, as a recent Iranian pictures seemed to indicate?
-
Military/technical question....
Wouldn't these drones have either a
a) self destruct load (Possible , not likely, it would certainly be another thing that can go wrong.)
b) locator beacon to give precise location, in the event it went down (& for needed laser guided bomb, or GPS guided Tomohawk missle strike??)(Yes definitely, might be disabled now.)
c) and do we not have military satellites with imaging computers that could pinpoint one of these being parked out in broad daylight, as a recent Iranian pictures seemed to indicate?(It is a pretty small thing to search for , but yes.)
-
I suppose I can see where a) might be a big backfire, especially if it went down in a largely civilian area, then detonated. But could't the charge be localized enough to simply talke out the vital computer tech and chips used?
And while b) may be disabled now, one would think there was a dedicated back-up for just just a situation.
And yes, I concede that c) would be like finding a needle in a haystack, but again, with the technology involved, one would think our folks could align our satellites to localize on a specific property of the drone. Or perhaps I've seen too many James Bond movies
-
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45685870/ns/world_news-christian_science_monitor/ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45685870/ns/world_news-christian_science_monitor/)
Oh!
This is pretty slick, all they needed to do was understand GPS well enough to imitate the GPS signal and spoof the drones guidence well enough that it thought itself over its own home base.
I can believe this , it really is plausable.
It means we still need the SR-71, can we get the museums to give one back?
-
This is pretty slick, all they needed to do was understand GPS well enough to imitate the GPS signal and spoof the drones guidence well enough that it thought itself over its own home base.
The drone wasn't using the private, encrypted, US military-only signal?
-
This is actually outside my expertise , so I am relying on wht is published, and spouting suppositions.
I don't think it important that the drone had the highest standard of GPS , the best encription, yesterday I did think this important , but what I read today makes me think otherwise.
NOte what they say in the link to the Christian Science Monitor, then read this.(Low complexity spoofing mitigation)http://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/signal-processing/low-complexity-spoofing-mitigation-12366
Information here matches what the Iranians are talking about pretty well.
www.gpsworld.com (http://www.gpsworld.com)(http://www.gpsworld.com/files/gpsworld/nodes/2011/12366/Fig1.jpg)
Signal Processing Low-Complexity Spoofing Mitigation
December 1, 2011
By: Saeed Daneshmand, Ali Jafarnia-Jahromi, Ali Broumandan, Gérard Lachapelle
GPS World
Most anti-spoofing techniques are computationally complicated or limited to a specific spoofing scenario. A new ...........
GNSS signals are highly vulnerable to in-band interference such as jamming and spoofing. Spoofing is an intentional interfering signal that aims to coerce GNSS receivers into generating false position/navigation solutions. A spoofing attack is, potentially, significantly more hazardous than jamming since the target receiver is not aware of this threat. In recent years, implementation of software receiver-based spoofers has become feasible due to rapid advances with software-defined radio (SDR) technology. Therefore, spoofing countermeasures have attracted significant interest in the GNSS community.
Most of the recently proposed anti-spoofing techniques focus on spoofing detection rather than on spoofing mitigation. Furthermore, most of these techniques are either restricted to specific spoofing scenarios or impose high computational complexity on receiver operation.
Due to the logistical limitations, spoofing transmitters often transmit several pseudorandom noise codes (PRNs) from the same antenna, while the authentic PRNs are transmitted from different satellites from different directions. This scenario is shown in Figure 1. In addition, to provide an effective spoofing attack, the individual spoofing PRNs should be as powerful as their authentic peers. Therefore, overall spatial energy of the spoofing signals, which is coming from one direction, is higher than other incident signals. Based on this common feature of the spoofing signals, we propose an effective null-steering approach to set up a countermeasure against spoofing attacks. This method employs a low-complexity processing technique to simultaneously de-spread the different incident signals and extract their spatia.........
Figure 1. Proposed anti-spoofing module.
Figure 2. Operational block diagram of proposed technique.
-
So here I use my imagination.
Place a very high quality receiver near the real home of the robot and record the signal that GPS produces there.
Use a high quality transmission to relay this signal to another location where a Jammer reproduces the signal in high fidelity but at a much greater level to overwhelm the original signal.
Robot in the neighborhood looses its data feed due to loud jamming and enters an autonomous mode so that it seeks its home.
High quality signal is not available due to high noise level on the important frequencies so the robot defaults to use of lower standard signal. Availible signal is correct for home base location but wrong for time of day by several seconds , robot trusts signal anyway because it is the only signal being understood.
Confused robot lands miles off target in unfriendly territory.
Local troops shoot landing gear to prevent the robot from relaunching itself.
Traumatised robot still thinks itself at home and does not resist capture .
Local troops throw metallic screens up around and over captured robot, preventing transmission or reception of genuine signals when jammer is turned off.
Technical experts arrive and disconnect power systems , drain fuel and search robot for self destruct devices.
Ayatollahs and Technicians throw party.
Used robot availible on e-Bay.
-
I agree with your speculation as being plausible, except for the last sentence.
Why sell it on E bay? The US would pay a lot of cash to get it back. The Chinese, the Indians, the North Koreans and others might all be willing to secretly participate in a less public auction.
-
I think upon further thought maybe self-destruct technology simply has not been perfected. it`s simply way too star trek for researcher to be allowed by the government too make it better. it`ll never get beyond the " good enough" stage. most laymen will always say it doesn`t look complicated to make. remember it`s a bomb designed to work but never to be used ,except for the most umpplanned situation.
anything that looks easy to the outside observers can be the hardest to do.
ex. color bubbles,sounds easy to do but it took 30 years and many millions to make.
-
The spoofing scenario you presented will only work on the civilian GPS signal. The military signal is encrypted (and hence can be digitally verified as authentic) and is not therefore susceptible to this type of spoofing.
A scenario that I could believe is that they jammed both the military and civilian GPS signals, then spoofed the civilian signals. And the military systems have a fall back to use the civilian signals if the military signals are lost. If this is true, expect this to be changed or disabled quickly. Either that, or they are using the civilian signals for the drones, which a stupid move.
-
The spoofing scenario you presented will only work on the civilian GPS signal. The military signal is encrypted (and hence can be digitally verified as authentic) and is not therefore susceptible to this type of spoofing.
A scenario that I could believe is that they jammed both the military and civilian GPS signals, then spoofed the civilian signals. And the military systems have a fall back to use the civilian signals if the military signals are lost. If this is true, expect this to be changed or disabled quickly. Either that, or they are using the civilian signals for the drones, which a stupid move.
You have it right, when the encripted signal was drowned the plane probly defaulted to an autopilot and /or relyance on the simpler civialian system.
It is still possible that the aircraft simply malfunctioned and the Iranians are taking advantage of the serindipity with a plausable lie.
But that it is plausable is important and that the Iranians have the drone mostly intact is important , the possible holes in our controll of the drones has to be fixed before we can really depend on them, and we can assume that the instrumentation that makes them so usefull will be showing up on Chineese and Russian stealthy aircraft pretty soon.
-
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/gps1011/index.php#/24 (http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/gps1011/index.php#/24)
-
Eventually, it will be known what happened. It could take a long time, and the public may never be told, or even interested in being told. Gary Powers wrote a book, I think, about his being brought down by the Soviets, and most people never bothered to read it, including me.
-
I think on this occasion I shall believe the Iranians.
Their story is plausable .
Not only that , I can't fault them for it.
If I knew of Iranian spy drones over the USA, and I thought up a meaconn to snag one I certainly would.
This incident is one for them, our side should salute them and say "well played".
-
It appears that the US intelligence is convinced that the drone is really what the Iranians say it is. And I certainly do not blame them for bringing it down, if that is what they did, and keeping it, since that is surely what we would do if we knocked down and Iranian drone.
So I agree with you, plane.
You can't win them all. Stuxnet almost certainly cost Iran more than this drone has cost us.
-
http://www.gpsworld.com/Defense/news/did-spoofing-down-drone-12430 (http://www.gpsworld.com/Defense/news/did-spoofing-down-drone-12430)
Related topics: Defense,Aviation & Space, GNSS System, Latest News, Precision Guidance, Security & Surveillance, Warfighter
Defense Did Spoofing Down Drone?
December 16, 2011
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Press reports speculate that GPS spoofing was used to get the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone to land in Iran. According to an Iranian engineer quoted in a Christian Science Monitor story, "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain." At that point, the drone relies on GPS signals to get home. By spoofing GPS, Iranian engineers were able to get the drone to "land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications."
"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving a detailed description of Iran's electronic ambush of the highly classified pilotless aircraft.
The Christian Science Monitor story says military experts and "a number of published papers on GPS spoofing" indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible: "Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, the story quotes former U.S. Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore as saying. He added that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”
"We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning deception of the aggressive systems,” the Iranian engineer reportedly said, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”
The story further quotes from a 2003 Los Alamos research paper, "GPS Spoofing Countermeasures," by Jon S. Warner and Roger G. Johnston:
“A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time that it is not. In a sophisticated spoofing attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false position.”
In September 2011, the U.S. Air Force awarded two $47 million contracts to BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman for development of a navigation warfare (NAVWAR) sensor to military GPS receivers on aircraft and missiles, and designed to maintain freedom of action under extreme GPS countermeasures.
Designed to replace traditional GPS elements in airborne GPS/INS systems the NAVWAR Sensor will reportedly be compatible with existing embedded GPS receivers, and offer 10 meter CEP location accuracy even under heavy jamming. In addition to providing consistent position, navigation and timing data, it will help protect secure Blue Force tracking networks and datalinks, both considered critical infrastructures susceptible to enemy electronic attacks.
Designed to operate in hostile electronic environment, the future receiver will also offer situational awareness acting as a signals intelligence sensor, enabling GPS jammer detection, characterization, geolocation, and reporting of GPS jammers. Networked NAVWAR sensors will also be able to exchange hostile jammer locations with other networked NAVWAR receivers, thus optimizing collective countermeasures against the threat. The system will integrate the multi-mode Y-Code, M-Code and C/A-code (YMCA) receiver to offer more advanced capabilities, compared with current military code anti-jam GPS receivers. It will possibly include advanced technologies such as inertial sensing, chip scale atomic clocks, anti-jam antenna electronics, direction finding and geolocation algorithms to achieve the high level of survivability the Air Force expects.
No mention is immediately evident of anti-spoofing capabilities in the new device under development.
-
It seems to me that the drone the Iranians have did self-destruct, and the Iranians pieced it back together. The classified guts probably do not require a major spectacular Chuck-Norris blowup to be rendered toast. There is a reason why the Iranians hid the undercarriage of this thing with a cloth. I suspect it is because they did not have enough pieces to reconstruct it convincingly.
-
It would be nice for you to be right about this XO , but this time I believe the Iranians are telling the truth.
I said this?
I wonder if I am alright.
-
They seem to be telling the truth about having a US drone. Whether they have anything they can reverse engineer or even whether they actually managed to bring it down we probably won't know for a long time.
-
I'm pretty damn sure if that ever get studied it'll be the russians or the chinese. It worth more as trade than tech to the iranians.
-
If it were studied by the Russians or Chinese, I imagine that the Iranians would get all the secrets they could as well. Iranians are not technologically backward: they have enough of technicians, engineers and experts to study this.
If they did have a device to destroy the operating system of the drone, I do not believe that it would have to be one that would explode the entire drone in a spectacular blast of fire and smoke. It does not take any major conflagration to ruin a motherboard or destroy a program on a chip. If a drone crashed and blew up accidentally, it would be seen as a bomb, and that might be a major disadvantage. The real world of espionage does not have any obligation to imitate Mission: Impossible.
-
Here is another thing.
This is the latest generation of stealth.
To give it false guidence they would have to know it was there.
If stealth is defeated we have spent a fantastic amount of money for nothing.
Our fighter and bomber fleet is about half as effective as we think, our drones half way to being useless.
I didn't see mention of what method was used to know when the drone was present. I hope that it was just a spy on the ground near where it was launched.
-
This is the latest generation of stealth.
To give it false guidence they would have to know it was there.
Stealth doesn't make it invisible to radar, it just reduces the signature to make it less likely to see it. There are other ways to ascertain it's position, once you have a suspicion it's there. And once you've guessed it's approximate location, you can use radar to pinpoint it.
It shows up as a very small radar signature, which can be, if you're only casually scanning the area, easy to lose in the background "noise". If you suspect something is in a small area, you can concentrate your attention - and even increase the gain of the signal - to make a small, normally inconsequential, radar return easier to spot.
I'll bet they used the control signals for the drone to make a guess at it's location.
-
Excellent information Ami. Thanks
-
It's a back and forth game. You up the anti in a specific technology field in some manner and as soon as you use it you run the risk of them catching on and upping the anti to counter it. Fortuneately a drone is not a human asset. A far greater tragedy was the loss of 20 some odd human assets, aka Navy SEALS, many from Team 6. That's a bit of technology that will be far more difficult to replace.
BSB
-
Agreed
-
It has been American Military philosophy to spend lavishly on tecnology and resorces that spare us casualtys.
The drones are a pure embodyment of this principal, if we loose a drone we can congradulate the enemy on a game well played, but if the drones become useless we will have to fall back to risking pilots .
-
This is the latest generation of stealth.
To give it false guidence they would have to know it was there.
Stealth doesn't make it invisible to radar, it just reduces the signature to make it less likely to see it.
Well yes , we lost a stealth aircraft in Bosnia.Apparently they used logic to make a good guess about where and when the aircraft would be overhead, we could have varied the missions track and time more to foil this, then by having the radar transmitter seaperated from the recever they overcame the stealth caricteristic long enough to guide AA and shoot it down.
Stealth doesn't need to be perfect , but it helps a lot if the potential observer doesn't know right when and where to look. I bet that it has become very hard to launch a drone from Packistan without having the fact on the phone to Iran immediately.
If the stealth of this drone can be copyed we will have to be on the lookout for the stealthy too.
-
http://cryptome.org/0005/iran-rsa-cipher.htm (http://cryptome.org/0005/iran-rsa-cipher.htm)
-
A single hacker with Leonardo Da Vinchi class insight isn't impossible , a more ordinary cracker team is a lot more likely.
Any small time perpertrator who got very chatty about it would be found reguardless.
To me the best reason to disbelieve the braggart is that he is bragging, his claims arn't impossible but seem like a good thing to keep quiet about.
On the other hand , assisstance from Russia doesn't seem unlikely in any respect , I havn't seen any proof that Iran had help , I would not feel surprise tho if I do.
I don't think it necessacery that any code was cracked , the interruption of the instruction stream would require jamming on most of the frequencys that the frequency hopping scheme used , this would requie loud, not sophisticated.
Without instructions the automatic pilot might could have flown home on inertial guidence, but if it detected a GPS that it understood it might default to it , this being the software we should change before there is another chance for them to do this.
If our codes were cracked that would of course have also worked quite well, I only hope that we don't have an inside guy that could prevent us from having dependable codes. During most of the Vietnam War we were betrayed for thirty bits of silver and we will never know how many men were lost as a result.
Untill evidence of some sort becomes public we may just have fun speculating.