You probably know, by now, that the Iranians have claimed that they hacked into a RQ-170 drone and caused it to land in Iran.
No doubt that there are several "I toljaso" emails going around the CIA and DOD right now. The concern about what would happen when we began flying those drones against a technically-capable adversary is not new.* If the Iranians can spoof the GPS of a drone to make it land several hundred miles off course, one might suppose that they can spoof the GPS guidance of a cruise missile or a rocket-propelled bomb to cause it to miss its target.
My point, though, is to discuss what is going on with the Iranian disclosures. It could be simple as one Iranian engineer foolishly running his mouth to a reporter, which might explain his subsequent fatal heart attack. Generally, though, one of the last things that a nation should want to do is brag about its intelligence capabilities and methods. If the Iranian spooks were running the show, the capture/recovery of the RQ-170 would have gone unacknowledged. Then our spooks would be left with the fact that a drone was missing. Under the pressure of higher-ups, they'd have flown more of them and maybe the Iranians would have gotten a couple more.
Or maybe they did. Or maybe the Iranians found out that we knew they had the drone, but still, a better tack would have been to say "hey, look what we found" and still leave our side guessing what happened.
The propaganda of "look what we can do" leads to a few possibilities. First, the ideologues overruled the spooks, in which case the Iranians have destroyed their own capabilities for a short-term (and probably ephemeral) political gain. Their political gain may also be internal; showing the Iranian people that Iran does have enemies. Second, the drone may have truly just malfunctioned and the Iranians are running a slick bit of disinformation to persuade America to stop flying those drones over Iran. Third, the Iranian spooks may have learned that the American spooks found out what happened, in which case, the Iranians incurred no cost for its propaganda display of the drone. Fourth, American spooks may have discovered that the Iranians were trying to hack the drones, so they sent a "Trojan horse" drone over Iran to mislead Iran, Russia and China as to what the capabilities of the RQ-170 are.**
Whatever the objective truth is of what happened with that drone, the chances are that we (as in "you and me who aren't spooks") don't know it.
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* I toljaso
** That may sound like "technothriller" level stuff, but weird shit does go on in the shadow world..
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9 comments:
The hack worked for the Rq170 but you can bet the RQ170mod1 is now in service.
For the military its' just like winders users, your find the anti virus and the hacked try to defeat it and for a moment they do until the next update for the antivirus..
Escalation...
Eck!
Eck, the problem is that a) you can always override a satellite signal with a more powerful terrestrial signal (see: inverse-square law), and
b) you can always spoof GPS *BECAUSE THAT IDIOT RUMSFELD REMOVED THE CAPABILITY TO ENCRYPT THE GPS SIGNAL ON THE LAST BATCH OF GPS SATELLITES HE SENT UP. No, I'm not kidding. Having the ability to transmit an encrypted GPS signal for military use was built into the GPS system from day one, but it cost money to have that capability in the satellites, and it cost money in terms of reduced satellite life too since the bulk taken up by the encryption gear took the place of fuel that the satellite could use for station keeping. So the moron okay'ed sending up a bunch of satellites *without* the encryption gear. And until those satellites die and are de-orbited, the encryption gear in the satellites that *do* have it is useless -- those satellites can simply be jammed and the satellites without encryption spoofed.
BTW, EBM, you're overlooking one last thing. If Iran has the ability to override GPS for a drone, they have that same ability to override GPS for military bombs. Iran's worried about an attack on their nuclear facilities by Israel. This could have been a warning, "if you try to attack us you'll not succeed because we'll spoof your GPS to have you bomb something else entirely." Far-fetched? Not really, Iran does that sort of thing on a fairly regular basis...
- Badtux the Flightless Penguin
Tux, Radio and RF is my game during the day. While your right about GPS that is far from the only way to navigate. Compass and speed can get you out of the area and is adequate for area navigation till
INS or GPS become useful again.
I may add I've done a lot of flying with only compass and the old mark 1 eyeballs. Add any radio navigation and things are easier and more accurate. and it doesn't have to be all that sophisticated.
Ask any pilot that has used ADF
to track a broadcast station for navigation.
As to jamming, it's not all that effective if the radios used are agile and the antennas don't look down. Again there are many solutions, some simple others elegant or complex.
So Always and Never do not hold well and usually or sometimes and rarely and frequently less are better terms.
And while square law gives advantage to closer station you have the problem of what if your not looking in that direction. Directional antennas are common. That can easily give a 20 or more Db advantage to the Sat than a ground station.
Jamming is like noise, at some point if you do not blind the receiver through overload it's fairly easy to discriminate weak signals under noise. The Hams do EME (moon as radio reflector) at low power using computer to do that.
In the end the current version may be dead but the v.2 bird will be different enough that what may have worked last time fails and you make the other guy work to figure out what is going on now.
The drones are largely autonomous
with enough smarts to take basic control like "turn left and head south for 15 minutes" into actions.
The major data paths are not incomming but outgoing ie: data and recon info.
Its cat and mouse but we have done it longer with USSR and others for years. In the end different is usually enough till they catch on..
They tipped their hand so we know they know so its time to change the rules again. What we do not know is how long it took them to figure it out or just get lucky.
There is a big difference in what is warranted when looking as in data gathering vs bombing. The biggest being a live man in the loop.
Eck!
My guess is that the drones only resort to compass heading when there's no GPS at all, if they have GPS signal they use the GPS signal instead. And if the bad guy is spoofing the GPS signal, that's a problem -- how can they tell a spoofed GPS signal from a real one?
Yes, we navigated prior to GPS. But the drones don't have inertial guidance systems and can't lock on radio beacons -- they're in hostile territory with no line of sight on any radio signal serviceable as a beacon.
Regarding agile radios and jamming, the Iranians aren't idiots. They have a CDMA cell phone network, for cryin' out loud, which is the exact same technology that you're talking about. Modern-day jamming isn't about sending out lots of noise, it's about sending out signals that *could* be correct -- but which aren't. Modern-day jamming is like Fox News, in other words -- Fox News accomplishes the goal of jamming the news transmittal facilities of America by adding incorrect information to the transmission so that people can't tell what's true and what's not true.
And, I'm not a radio engineer, but I've been a ham for quite some time. EME is quite possible using CW, indeed that was the original mode used by amateur radio operators for EME long before personal computers -- the first EME by hams was done in 1953, for cryin' out loud. What modern digital data processing allows is a higher bit rate with lower loss, via using encodings that are inherently noise resistant. Actually I suspect JT65 probably can pull in signal better than the Mark 2 Ear, but that's part of the design criteria (its encoding was chosen for distinguishability from noise, rather than for speed).
The biggest issue here, BTW, isn't the drones. The drones can be easily modified. The biggest issue is the *satellites*. You can't exactly pull a satellite into a hanger and re-jigger its transmitter! It has what it had when you launched it, however many years ago that was, and that's that.
- Badtux the Hammy Penguin
BadTux said: BTW, EBM, you're overlooking one last thing. If Iran has the ability to override GPS for a drone, they have that same ability to override GPS for military bombs.
No, I didn't. Read the last sentence of the second paragraph of my post.
EBM as to the bombs they have used terrain guidance and of course optical (laser designated or camera).
Makes it harder that's all.
Tux, I'm also a ham. GPS is both simple and complex and while you can spoof it the doppler and other effects unique to sats are a signature. IT does take a bit of processing but when the constellation goes weird suddenly or has an unusual origin then you
can check further. Also anything ground based has the disadvantage for an air based antenna thats looking up. Obviously nothing is trivial or simple but not out of the real of avoidable or detectable.
In the end like I first said is a techno war of escalation of technologies and capability. Helps to be stealthy too.
Eck!
ECK!, the Iranians have this new innovation called *AIRCRAFT*. Clearly they had to have been in the air with their equivalent of an AWACS to pull this off, because the satellite antenna on the top of a drone can't be jammed from the ground because it's looking *up* (duh!). Regarding doppler effects etc., once again you're assuming the Iranians are idiots. Which makes you no different from the perfumed princes of the Pentagon, but still, assuming that your adversary is an idiot, when they've just proven that they're *not* idiots, is... uhm. What's that word I'm looking for, again?
My guess is that the next time a U.S. drone over Iraq loses its C&C it'll just turn due magnetic south and fly until it re-acquires C&C or runs out of fuel, which will crash it into the ocean somewhere. This drone being captured by the Iranians is not that big a deal because our drones don't carry anything particularly confidential in them -- the principles via which they operate are well known and all the data gets sent out via satellite in real time -- but it's an embarrassment, whereas a drone crashing into the sea is not.
Regarding laser designators, Israel invented them, but did not use those on Osirak because they require you to fly high enough that you can designate the target for the entire flight of the bomb -- something not recommended for your health in the presence of a functioning air defense system. Israel used dumb bombs to attack Osirak, doable because the Osirak complex was large and exposed and even a blind man could hit it with a dumb bomb. But most of the Iranian nuclear facilities are buried underground. That's a much harder target to take out... and Iran just announced to the world that one of the methods of doing so (GPS-guided bombs or missiles) is no longer reliable.
Tux, your right. It's arrogance to think we can compete and possibly win in a technological war that requires infrastructure to build and support.
Eck!
Especially since the U.S. infrastructure is running down big-time. You know why the F-35 program has been such a disaster? Simple: The last time the U.S. tried designing a fighter from scratch was in the mid 1970's. We no longer had the infrastructure -- the experienced people or the *physical* infrastructure -- to design fighter planes from scratch. We're having to build both the infrastructure *and* the planes at the same time, which is slow and expensive.
Iran is a nation of 70 million people meaning they have plenty of smart people. South Korea has 50 million people and is whipping our butts in many technological areas (that fancy iPad? Has a South Korean microprocessor in it!), so Iran has plenty of people to compete technologically. They don't have a large technological infrastructure, but they have access to world markets and can get most of what they need from the same place that the F-35 is getting a lot of bits and pieces -- i.e., from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. It is utter hubris to believe that the U.S. has a monopoly on smartness or technology -- the same sort of hubris that led to this drone being landed by the Iranians in the first place.
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