Predator drones use less encryption than your TV, DVDs
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
While merely embarrassing on the surface, one has to consider the strong likelihood that the intelligence-gathering operations of other countries have probably known this for years and could by now have accumulated a vast amount of data on the disposition and tactics of US forces in multiple theaters. What an enormous strategic blunder.
This is totally the opposite. The drones need only have the capacity to encrypt their video and decrypt command/control information from the host.
Both drone and host are unique devices that could (given their incredible pricetag) easily have unique public/private key pairs for each drone and each control station. Before takeoff each could be paired by an exchange of fresh keys. The only attack is brute-force with an as yet unavailable amount of computing power.
That they failed to do something like this for so long, well, words fail me.
If they were doing it today all they would need is a $30 32 GB flash card full of random data to use as a one-time pad.
It's interesting to see how the Army and the MPAA respond differently to the same problem - it only takes one person to crack the code (or leak the secret keys) to render the whole scheme useless. The MPAA builds ridiculously complex encryption schemes in the hopes of slowing people down, and sues the downloaders it can find. The Army doesn't bother with encryption because it's too much of a burden, and kills the downloaders it can find.
No video feed back then was encrypted --- military or otherwise --- because the computers with the power even to digitize video in real time, let alone digitize it and then encrypt the digital stream, would have been huge.
It was a common selling point for satellite receivers back then that you could buy them and use them to watch the raw feed of just about everything being broadcast, because it was all analog streams being relayed in the clear. There's actually a pretty good movie floating around the internet called "Feed," [1] made by a guy recording satellite feeds of the 1992 election coverage.
DVB-S came out in 1993 and was one of the first digital standards. It uses DES-based encryption. http://www.dvb.org/about_dvb/history/
While it may have been difficult to fully-encrypt the video with airborne hardware in the early 1990's, they certainly could have made some effort to scramble it. And by now, it should have been updated to 2002-era webcam technology.
Most of the surprise is people confusing the NSA with the military. While the NSA may have the latest and greatest tech, the military is always much farther behind.
Right. Because people in third-world countries are clearly far too backwards and ignorant to understand anything involving computers or technology.
Unlike in the past, nowadays it is relatively easy to gain access to technical knowledge. If someone has access to the web and knows enough English they are basically at the same distance from information (=1) as someone in a developed world. All it takes is a lot of time and persistence.
So there might be third-world countries but there are no third world people.
Still, incredibly stupid nonetheless.
It wasn't until the recent upgrade of Air Force 1 that the communications between ground and the president's airplane were encrypted. Anyone with a short wave radio could listen in.
What exactly is the risk that they are reading this?
But.
Is it really necessary that they encrypt the video streams? The people these aircraft are surveiling, for the most part, know of the plane's presence. Are they really gaining THAT much of an advantage of being able to see their own position?
Beyond that--not to go into full tinfoil-hat mode, but maybe this non-encryption is intentional? Letting the surveilled see SOME of the footage, then playing LOTS AND LOTS more would only serve to confuse/frighten them.
A dedicated foreign-intelligence adversary can at a minimum wikileak pirate footage of American drones they have setup to bomb funerals and weddings. The propaganda value of that is huge.
Al-Qaeda themselves might be interested in this footage. They would want to see how the Americans wage remote-controlled Aerial warfare, and the footage helps them look for clues on how to best fight the drones in their other/future encounters with the U.S. in other theaters.
In Afghanistan we have other intelligence agencies helping us; British, Saudi, Israeli, Egyptian, Pakistani, neighboring ex-Soviet Republics, etc. While our interests overlap for now, you can bet that every one of them has their own national interests in mind and they're all eager to swipe some knowledge from us while we're "friends". The biggest US/Soviet intelligence swap and counter-influence actually happened during their alliance against Germany. And you can bet that we ourselves spy on our friends as well, and constantly monitor and anticipate their capabilities (sometimes even volunteer to build these capabilities, because arming someone yourself and training them goes along way towards keeping them under your surveillance; why spy when you can just read your own export-lists?)
But hey, this means I can start sending user logins in cleartext and add in the product page that we have "military-grade security."