Ask HN: How vulnerable is Russian military hardware to hacking? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How vulnerable is Russian military hardware to hacking?

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If there's one thing I've learned from listening to the Darknet Diaries podcast, it's that almost any important piece of computerised equipment is vulnerable to sabotage. Even obscure industrial controllers in oil refineries can be damaged if you're familiar with how they work, and you're creative enough to nudge them into an unsafe state.

So when I see that 64km military convoy outside Kyiv...

...full of heavily armoured vehicles and brutal looking military gear...

...I naturally wonder: how much of this kit is computerised? How vulnerable is it to malicious code?

Instead of taking down websites, could Anonymous reasonably develop a 0-day for the 9K720 short-range tactical ballistic missile system? Does the Koalitsiya-SV 152mm self-propelled howitzer even have Wi-Fi?

This is just a random Sunday morning thought, but I'd be interested if anybody can enlighten me on any of this.

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Firstly, I'm sure with physical access you could brick certain digital components. But a lot of the hardware is from the soviet era -- see, e.g. [1] for a relatively accurate list of destroyed hardware on both sides, backed up by social-media posted photos -- and therefore almost by definition will not have large, complex integrated computers with a large attack surface. There are some videos of the inside of the tanks doing the rounds on social media: if anything, a lot of the "driving" looks like driving a 1950s tractor more than a modern machine.

The only high-tech devices are likely to be anything to do with radar, communications, night-vision, or fire-control computers. While some of these are networked, they're not exactly going to be running a detailed tcp/ip stack. Howitzers are not going to have wifi. They're probably going to be entirely usable with nothing more than an analogue or paper-based fire control computer.

Secondly, military vehicles (and vehicles in general) are designed to be very robust to computer failure and fail safe. Russia has its own processor, the Elbrus, and anything "actually sensitive" is almost certainly built on that unfamiliar, probably-not-backdoored, basis. Military systems in the west use everything from port knocking to asymmetric crypto with signing certificates stored thousands of miles away to make this sort of approach unlikely.

Instead, what I think is more likely is that the ukranian air force is in a better state than expected because they've effectively infiltrated Russia's identity friend-or-foe (IFF) system. All of those captured AA / SAM sites are information goldmines and means that it's going to be very difficult for them to work out who is on whose side. There must have been a nonzero number of friendly fire incidents on the russian side, of that I am sure.

[1] https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...

In 1966 the Mossad convinced an Iraqi pilot to defect and bring a MiG-21 with him to Israel [1]

Not a lot was known about the plane by the west back then, and it was crucial for Israel to know how to defete it in battle.

Later in 1967, during aerial battles over the Golan Heights, the Israeli Air Force brought down 6 Syrian MiG-21s without losing any of its Dassault Mirage IIIs.

I would assume such operations are being conducted today as well and Russian high-tech equipment found its' way to the west.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Diamond

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