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Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

csmonitor.com

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Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#21

Post by grecy »

Lets flip the tables here and imagine Iran is flying surveillance drones over mainland USA, gathering photos and who knows what else. Would it be unreasonable to think the USA would try with everything they've got to shoot them down and/or capture them? Who would be the bad guy in that scenario?

I find it amusing nobody has thought to question what right the US have to fly a surveillance drone over Iran to spy on the country/people. Furthermore, I think it's pretty clear if you choose to cross a well established border and put something in my country without my permission, for the express purpose of spying on me, you better know I'm going to try hard to capture it as my own.

Is it even "legal" for the US to be doing this?

Who judges who can spy on who, and who is the "bad" guy when one side captures gear from the other side?

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#22

Post by caudicus »

andrewcooke wrote: post #9
rbanffy wrote: post #3

Relying on GPS or any external source of navigational data is risky. I cannot believe the vehicle didn't have working inertial navigation that would clearly indicate the GPS was off by quite a lot. Simple rule - if you have no contact with home and your GPS says you are a couple hundred miles away from where your inertial navigation, your compass and all visual cues (if cruise missiles have it, so should this bird) t…

i am also confused about the emphasis on GPS (see my comment), but i would guess that restricting the technology used in these things keeps the price down. GPS is good enough to label images, and probably good enough to guide something flying at a moderate altitude. it may have made more sense to keep these things (relatively) cheap (that also means if they are lost, there is less technology lost too).

It's probably just "failure of imagination" in preventing this hack - inertial navigation tech isn't exactly new (was pioneered in WWII and really came to age building ballistic missile navigation systems) so I doubt cost/classified technology would be a factor. It's just sad because having an intertial navigation system and a GPS system working to agree with each other or else some fallback (inertial homeward bound since that's an internal system, your accuracy would be off but it'd get back to friendly territory at least) would have prevented an attack like this (I believe at least - please tell me if I'm wrong).

Found this through a quick Google search - "DIY drones" http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/autopilot-system-for-full-...

I'm not sure what hardware in the system is really making the Iranian's mouths water - obviously the stealth tech has to have a great monetary and military value...I wonder how much the internals of this system compare to a predator drone that they already have captured many of as the article stated.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#23

Post by nosequel »

blhack wrote: post #10

(Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being…

I won't comment on the UAV in the article, but you'd have to be a pretty wealthy person and have some really weird stuff on your kitchen table to have what is on the global hawk. I won't comment on specifics, but there is nothing simple about its gps and inertial navigation systems. Your categorization of UAV's was fairly simplistic and there are many more categories than two.

The Global Hawk is a much more expensive aircraft than the RQ-170 and is in a completely different category of aircraft. What happen to RQ-170 could not be done to the Global Hawk with they way its navigation works.

I don't want people thinking that autonomous aircraft are some simple thing that anyone can do. If that was the case, other countries would make them instead of buying them from the US.

Good luck making a laser ring gyro with a walk of http://www51.honeywell.com/aero/common/documents/myaerospace...

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#25

Post by daenz »

thematt wrote: post #15
daenz wrote: post #13

Just throwing this out there, maybe the drone was intended to be caught as part of another kind of intelligence gathering operation. It's easy to blame this on incompetence, but the other angle is that the drone being caught was made to look like an accident in order to collect intelligence (gps, audio, etc) from wherever the Iranians took it, and this data could be offloaded to someone that could gain access to the…

I've heard that suggested before, but it's probably in a warehouse on some military base being examined. It's unlikely we'd gain any valuable intelligence from the environment they bring it to. It's not like they're going to park it in their nuclear facility to do the dissection.

Yeah I guess you're right. Just with everything I'm reading about "how it was done", I'm finding it really hard to believe that these subsystems weren't audited for flaws before they deployed.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#26

Post by tantalor »

blhack wrote: post #10

(Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being…

> this drone model requires no human intervention

No, the article clearly says that Iran severed the pilot's communication channel.

> "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

> made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center

I believe this channel is over satellite, whereas the take-off/landing channel is line-of-sight like your R/C plane.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#27

Post by brown9-2 »

grecy wrote: post #21

Lets flip the tables here and imagine Iran is flying surveillance drones over mainland USA, gathering photos and who knows what else. Would it be unreasonable to think the USA would try with everything they've got to shoot them down and/or capture them? Who would be the bad guy in that scenario? I find it amusing nobody has thought to question what right the US have to fly a surveillance drone over Iran to spy on the…

I don't see anyone saying that what Iran did is wrong, do you? It seems that prevention is expected.

The secret of international law is that it doesn't really exist. Or that the "law' in "international law" does not mean the same meaning as the "domestic law" within a country's borders. All you have are agreements between countries but with no true external body that can enforce penalties or punishments without the threat of war. So what happens is that the most powerful win arguments.

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#28

Post by drunkenmasta »

tantalor wrote: post #26
blhack wrote: post #10

(Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being…

> this drone model requires no human intervention No, the article clearly says that Iran severed the pilot's communication channel. > "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain." > made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center I be…

What about the argument that a military plane would have multiple levels of internal defense such as automatic destruction? I read an argument by a supposed engineer who wrote that the auto protect mode would cause the plane to fly vertically towards the ground to cause as much damage to the plane as possible, which is why he/she was skeptical that Iran had a fully intact aircraft. See http://www.offiziere.ch/?p=6868

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#29

Post by tantalor »

grecy wrote: post #21

Lets flip the tables here and imagine Iran is flying surveillance drones over mainland USA, gathering photos and who knows what else. Would it be unreasonable to think the USA would try with everything they've got to shoot them down and/or capture them? Who would be the bad guy in that scenario? I find it amusing nobody has thought to question what right the US have to fly a surveillance drone over Iran to spy on the…

> Is it even "legal" for the US to be doing this?

From Wikipedia,

On 9 December 2011, Iran lodged a formal complaint to the United Nations Security Council over the UAV violating its airspace. Iran's U.N. ambassador stated in the letter that "My government emphasizes that this blatant and unprovoked air violation by the United States government is tantamount to an act of hostility against the Islamic Republic of Iran in clear contravention of international law, in particular, the basic tenets of the United Nations Charter."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-US_RQ-170_incident#Complai...

So, I think the short answer is that it's not illegal.

On the other hand, if Iran had captured the pilot of a manned aircraft, they would certainly charge him with espionage, like Francis Gary Powers, the downed U-2 pilot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident#Aftermath

Re: Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

#30

Post by StuffMaster »

nosequel wrote: post #23
blhack wrote: post #10

(Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being…

I won't comment on the UAV in the article, but you'd have to be a pretty wealthy person and have some really weird stuff on your kitchen table to have what is on the global hawk. I won't comment on specifics, but there is nothing simple about its gps and inertial navigation systems. Your categorization of UAV's was fairly simplistic and there are many more categories than two. The Global Hawk is a much more expensive…

I think he was just making fun of how easy it was to capture.
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