Drone Hack

8:12 pm EST December 17th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 6 Comments

This seems like a failure on the side of multi-billion dollar contractors and the military people signing off on their work.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

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6 Responses to “Drone Hack”

  1. jr says:
    December 17, 2009 at 11:06 pm

    This is what happens when you Randize the military

  2. Nick P. says:
    December 18, 2009 at 12:13 am

    “Seems like a failure” is such a mild way to put it – this is a pretty catastrophic screwup.

  3. william says:
    December 18, 2009 at 9:21 am

    “the command and control links cannot be hacked by a few dollars of radio shack equipment.”

    “to actually take advantage of this video stream you have to know:
    1. Where it is coming from: the video probably does not have the necessary ‘telemetry’ transmitted with it, which means the images could be coming from anywhere.
    2. When the image was taken – basically not all images need be real time.
    Be able to act on 1 and 2
    3. The fact is by the time someone could unravel 1 and 2, the information is stale and of no use.”

    “The reporting by the media on the magic of modern communications is painfully embarrassing.”

    http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11913

  4. Cruise Noorwegen says:
    December 18, 2009 at 10:41 am

    Amazing to see that you protect against the worst you can think off, and get attacked by the least you can think of. A 29$ tool….

  5. ENDIF says:
    December 18, 2009 at 1:26 pm

    Ridiculous.

    There is no hacking.
    They’re plucking video from the air.

    The video is unencrypted because ground units can be killed or captured. Captured equipment must contain the encryption key in order to decode encrypted data, and that key must not fall into enemy hands.

    The video stream being intercepted is the video being pushed on demand to forward ground units. Given that anyone intercepting this video will have no idea what they’re looking at unless they are *intimately* familiar with the terrain being viewed, it is useless to them.

    This video is not constantly transmitted, so it would be incredibly difficult to use it to track the UAV.

    All other datastreams are encrypted and secure.
    You’ve been taken in by a poorly researched article.

  6. AwkwardSilence says:
    December 18, 2009 at 6:53 pm

    The video is unencrypted because ground units can be killed or captured. Captured equipment must contain the encryption key in order to decode encrypted data, and that key must not fall into enemy hands.

    Weeeeell, mostly incorrect. We’re not talking about the fucking enigma machine here. There are plenty of modern, mutable, software-based ways to encrypt source data (at a reasonable strength) without compromising a ground unit’s ability to read it, or putting anything of value in danger by allowing its public key to be “captured”.

    If they’re captured, killed, or offline for any amount of time- you can change the key that’s being used to encrypt data. This whole “key must not fall into enemy hands” nonsense makes for great movies, but doesn’t really apply to the real world.

    And frankly, I’d expect our military transactions to at least employ the level of cryptographic protection Amazon does with my browser when I buy a frigging book.

    And finally, even weak encryption > no encryption. There’s no reason not to.