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Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

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Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#71

Post by jbooth »

rospaya wrote: post #56
ck2 wrote: post #3

Iran is not some backwater and it's not north korea. When politicians sing about "bomb Iran" these are the innocent people they are talking about killing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v6kF8i-mbw http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/01/a-view-inside-ira... Before 1970 you would not be able to identify pictures of iran from parts of the usa http://www.pagef30.com/2009/04/iran-in-1970s-before-islamic-... Currently…

> When politicians sing about "bomb Iran" these are the innocent people they are talking about killing Isn't that every country?

For the 2nd part, yeah, for the first part Iran's the only place you hear glib talk about how we should bomb it to prove how tough we are in presidential debates.

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#72

Post by parfe »

regularfry wrote: post #68
parfe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the "red key" real or mythical?

There's a secret key involved in the anti-spoofing part of GPS, but I don't know if it's actually called a "red key" by people who use it.

The wiki article on GPS encryption seems to say that stealing the key for one satellite is possible (720 gigabytes), but the master key at 26 terabytes seems slightly harder to sneak out in an email or USB key. Of course I'm a wiki expert on this, so someone with actual knowledge could probably be more informative.

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#73

Post by johnyzee »

ajays wrote: post #59
dendory wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people talk about Iran it's more about the things that are, by any definition, wrong, than their traditional or religious choice. You simply cannot, in any modern society, discriminate against someone because it happens to be a woman, or throw stone at someone until they die because you didn't like his opinion. You can defend ideals, you cannot defend barbarism. Some of the things these people do (and others in…

You simply cannot, in any modern society, discriminate against someone because it happens to be a woman, or throw stone at someone until they die because you didn't like his opinion. And yet the US is the strongest ally of the worst offenders in this regard, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Women can't vote or drive in Saudi Arabia; heck, they can't even go out alone, and can't go out with a male who is not a blood relative…

Not to mention that America electrocutes people to death, which may be slightly cleaner than a stoning but not exactly humanitarian.

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#74

Post by sunchild »

dekz wrote: post #33
Steuard wrote: post #14

The article confuses me: it seems to be conflating the RSA algorithm (which I could easily believe might be used to encrypt military GPS) with the RSA company (a division of EMC which was hacked and had its SecurID product compromised recently). Am I missing something, or is the author just confused? Why would having "broken into EMC's RSA servers" be at all related to being "in pursuit of a cryptanalytic attack agai…

I was a little confused also, I am under the impression that he is mentioning 2 points. 1) Attack on RSA to attempt to see if RSA has some attack on the RSA algorithm hidden. 2) Using an attack on SecurID to attempt to get more information from a Lockheed Martin or other breach.

Yes, it was widely reported that Lockheed was a target after SecurID was breached. Whether or not anything useful was extracted from Lockheed's systems, and whether or not any Lockheed data was involved in spoofing the drone, is pure speculation. It seems equally plausible that Iran had an inside man at a defense contractor. After all, history has shown how relatively inexpensive and effective double agents are to state actors.

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#75

Post by itsnotlupus »

wmf wrote: post #70
regularfry wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he's arguing that the attack in which SecurID was compromised also resulted in the red key being compromised.

How? Why would RSA Inc. have a copy of a secret military crypto key? (Edit: I see a few other people have made the same point below.)

There were stories floating around* that Lockheed had a remote intrusion problem linked to the securid compromise, and that perhaps US contractor companies were the real target behind the RSA hack.

That would draw a nice line between securid and secret data found on gps satellites manufactured by lockheed.

*: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/27/lockheed_securid_hac...

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#76

Post by cameldrv »

vbtemp wrote: post #63
parfe wrote: post #55

All these complex and sophisticated attacks seem like too much work. It looks like the author either omits a step from the attack where the SecurID compromise allowed someone access to flight control systems or that RSA has a master key/method for breaking any RSA encrypted data. I think the drone ran out of fuel. The flight control system prevented a stall by trading altitude for speed. Some emergency collision code…

Right - no one wants to consider this null hypothesis. Not exciting enough, I suppose. Actually spoofing GPS - which would involve masking the actual GPS signal and producing the precise nanosecond differentials from a simulated fleet of satellites needed to give a false location, seems highly unbelievable. GPS jamming is possible, which may have led to a loss of nav (although I would have thought there may be some i…

Spoofing GPS, at least the C/A code is not such a huge challenge. You can buy the hard part off the shelf from many vendors. For example, http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/206805

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#77

Post by regularfry »

parfe wrote: post #72
regularfry wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a secret key involved in the anti-spoofing part of GPS, but I don't know if it's actually called a "red key" by people who use it.

The wiki article on GPS encryption seems to say that stealing the key for one satellite is possible (720 gigabytes), but the master key at 26 terabytes seems slightly harder to sneak out in an email or USB key. Of course I'm a wiki expert on this, so someone with actual knowledge could probably be more informative.

Those are just the sizes of the pseudorandom sequences produced by a PRNG. They'll be defined by structures much smaller than that. However, that's not the bit that needs stealing, and doesn't even strictly need to be secret.

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#78

Post by 46Bit »

agwa wrote: post #58

It's pretty rash for the article to suggest that the RSA algorithm might have been broken. If the key really has been stolen, it seems far more likely that it was breached due to crap IT security than a recently-discovered bombshell weakness in the RSA algorithm. For example, the RSA corporation's SecurID service (not to be confused with the RSA algorithm) was compromised due to a spear-phishing attack containing an…

> in particular, Lockheed Martin claims no data was stolen If you had something particularly secret stolen you're not going to air it publicly. Agree with everything else though - even if this hypothesising is true it'll be down to a stolen key.

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#79

Post by beagle3 »

dextorious wrote: post #40
beagle3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What exactly is specifically bad about the Iranian government that other countries have not already did, including the US? Did you notice that Libya, Tunisia and Egypt already had a popular revolution, and that Syria is still having one? Would you have said, 12 months ago, that the majority of Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans WANT to live like they do, and RESPECT their country's ideals? If not, why not? and why is…

"""Did you notice that Libya, Tunisia and Egypt already had a popular revolution, and that Syria is still having one? Would you have said, 12 months ago, that the majority of Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans WANT to live like they do, and RESPECT their country's ideals?""" Not only I noticed, but I live near those parts of the world, have friends there, and know that what you seem to believe about those countries has…

Thanks for your answer. I can't speak for other people, but that's what I thought (that is, they don't like the current regime, they're not trying to become american or anything). And I also agree that it is more likely that Tunisia and Egypt will end up like Iraq than like a western country.

But you answered my rhetorical setup, and not my actual question: Why do you believe Iran is different than Syria, Egypt and Tunisia in this respect? (although it can be debated, I'll accept that Libya wouldn't have happened the way it did without western support, and by support I mean "strong coaxing, military aid, and monetary aid")

Re: Drone captured by Iran may mean military GPS RSA "red key" has been compromised

#80

Post by [deleted] »

johnyzee wrote: post #73
ajays wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You simply cannot, in any modern society, discriminate against someone because it happens to be a woman, or throw stone at someone until they die because you didn't like his opinion. And yet the US is the strongest ally of the worst offenders in this regard, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Women can't vote or drive in Saudi Arabia; heck, they can't even go out alone, and can't go out with a male who is not a blood relative…

Not to mention that America electrocutes people to death, which may be slightly cleaner than a stoning but not exactly humanitarian.

[deleted]
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