Another drone???

[kimba1]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/13/us-drone-crashes-in-seychelles/


The very best politics is will tell you to spend on.

[Plane]

   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.

[sirs]

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?

[Plane]

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.)

[sirs]

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

[Plane]

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?

[Amianthus]

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?

[Plane]

  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


 

   
 
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.

[Plane]

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.
 

[Xavier_Onassis]

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.

[kimba1]

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.

[Amianthus]

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.

[Plane]

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.

[Plane]

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/questex/gps1011/index.php#/24

[Xavier_Onassis]

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.