US Drone lost to Iran

[RedRed]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/15/us_spy_drone_gps_spoofing/

I dont know if it was covered in the US - it wasnt much here.
The thing landed in Iran. It is a steath recon drone.

The link above demonstrates how it may have been done....


3 things spring to mind.

1 it was somehow hacked.
2 it landed (and everything recovered)
3 as a stealth device, it must not be particularly effective, as it would have had to been detected to be hacked. It looks like a stealthbomber - but much smaller - does Iran have tech for detecting stealthed kit?

[dZeus]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12..._gps_spoofing/

I dont know if it was covered in the US - it wasnt much here.
The thing landed in Iran. It is a steath recon drone.

The link above demonstrates how it may have been done....


3 things spring to mind.

1 it was somehow hacked.
2 it landed (and everything recovered)
3 as a stealth device, it must not be particularly effective, as it would have had to been detected to be hacked. It looks like a stealthbomber - but much smaller - does Iran have tech for detecting stealthed kit?

According to the info provided, it wasn't hacked. The communication channel was jammed and a spoofed GPS signal was provided to make the drone think it would land at its home base.

I've also read that since the Drone uses a single-engine design, the odds of losing one due to malfunction were theoretically high enough to not use too sensitive technology in it. That and the Iranians have yet to successfully reverse engineer their F14 Tomcats (if they're trying that is).

While this is very bad publicity for the US, it probably doesn't have that great consequences. Maybe reduced usage of drones over Iran, in case they are able to pull of the same trick again. The upside is that the Iranians are showing weaknesses in current technology used by the west (e.g. pseudo-security provided by the currently employed SSL Certificate Authority structure, unsigned GPS signals, etc.).

I also am wondering if currently employed missile technology can be tricked by the same means. If Iran would have the technology and infrastructure to deploy this on larger scale, it could provide with some very unexpected results in case of an armed conflict occurs...

[degrub]

if we had to go back to un-assisted guidance ie preprogrammed flight path, inertial rather than satellite guided, then we loose some targeting accuracy. They can still fly.

[RedRed]

I meant Hacked in the looses sense - spoofed/hacked same thing, sorta - engineering hackery outside the design of the product.... like you used to be able to hack a free call in a phone booth. Indeed spoofed suggests repeatable - so probably no flying until that can be blocked...

The model is one of the most sophisticated recce drones the US uses - and yes, they expect to loose them so they dont have all the jucy tech possible..

[VJ]

It just surprises me it was not self-destructed. Even if it contains no sophisticated technology, it can still show for instance that the hack/spoof thing worked. If it just blew up, it would be less clear if it worked.

[cjolley]

That it landed undamaged strikes me as really strange. Spoofing the GPS to get it out of our control I can see. Landing it? I don't believe it.
I wouldn't plug a computer I owned into it, that thing may be oozing Stuxnet2 out of every port.

[Dr Mordrid]

Drones are programmed with a "go home" routine. If their comms encounter interference they navigate back to their base and perform an autonomous landing. In this case the GPS signals were simultaneously overridden with false coordinates, so it landed somewhere else than it normally would have.

What amazes me is that there wasn't a fallback inertial navigation system to at least send it back in the correct general direction or intrusion self-destruct - either explosive or an incendiary charge lining the cases of critical hardware.

It also bothers me that our Administration didn't order a cruise missile strike on the drone. Do nothing and pretty please are NOT viable options IMO.

[cjolley]

I doesn't make sense. Did they spoof the altitude too? Runway alignment? Compass directions?
What kind of guidance program could survive suddenly being told it was 500 or 1000 miles west of it's last coordinate. Going in a different direction? At a different altitude?
The thing would do a somersault in the air trying to stay on course.

[Dr Mordrid]

A full GPS data spoof would give longitude, latitude, elevation and the with GPS compass circuitry the heading. They interferred with the comms to put it into "go home" mode then spoofed it think home was at coordinates in the desert and the landing gear hasn't been shown because it's damaged - it landed on irregular sand instead of a smooth runway.

[cjolley]

All that is just a bridge or two too far. If they really pulled that off they were amazingly lucky.

[dZeus]

All that is just a bridge or two too far. If they really pulled that off they were amazingly lucky.

that's the kind of thinking that will make you lose drone #2

It is very clear that they didn't expect the GPS spoofing attack. You'd expect at least a build-in digital compass, air speed and altitude to detect a GPS spoofing attack and as a result self-destruct.

I assume no strike was performed because the drone did not know where it really was (transmitted spoofed coordinates), and/or its communications channel for this is the same as for the regular control (which was jammed by the Iranians).

[Evildead666]

There was an article a couple of days ago about different countries in the world complaining that some foreign states (they named Iran) blocking satellite transmissions.

They mainly bitched about telecoms and such, but this sort of thing comes under that umbrella too.

[cjolley]

that's the kind of thinking that will make you lose drone #2

It's the landing it relatively undamaged that I find amazing. Not the fact that they could jam it and spoof it's GPS signals.

Obviously, counter measures need to be put in place.

[VJ]

I'm surprised there is no INS as backup. An automated self destruct could be as easy as "if the aircraft does not receive a pre-agreed pseudorandom code every x minutes, climb and explode". No system sent out in hostile territories should require outside input for navigation.

[MultimediaMan]

Stop all this loose talk about "self-destructing": it has killed many an engineer working on it. I highly recommend taking Failure Analysis courses; most advanced FA classes for Mechanical Engineers deal with such things as Safeties and other types of "Action Links", and the management of them.

The problem with "Self-Destruct" mechanisms is that in order to be safe, they have to be command-initiated. Anything else is properly defined as a fuse. And believe you me, quite a few "fuzes" have been lit and gone off, often with disasterous results.

I could start with computer programs and end with Nuclear Warheads as far as how many "Confirmed Continuance" schemes have gone bad. Many years ago software engineers wrote programs which had timers or lockouts preventing runaways... these same programs would also terminate unexpectedly when running normally but were waiting on a response from another system qwhich had failed, causing a dependecy failure. This has caused more than one mainframe outage. In the case of Nuclear Weapons, some maniac Russian thought it would be a good idea to send heartbeats to Nuclear Weapons... and so they did; and when the heartbeat receiver at one facility stopped working, the system very nearly launched "automatically". The Russians dismantled that system very shortly thereafter.

The point is this: never put a system in place where it can do harm unattended, unless you are willing to accept with the consequences.

Sending a Cruise Missile in would be an Act of War. Even if it is to blow up your own machine...sending a missile into a sovereign country is a no-no unless you are at War. And believe me, the Iranians are spoiling for an excuse for a fight.