Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone | Hacker News Reader

Report: Iran Hacked, Hijacked U.S. Drone

csmonitor.com

202 pointsthematt126 comments

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?

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.

You are correct in that this (and many other related articles) are not directly saying what Iran did is wrong... however, I feel the general tone and overall implication is that Iran have "taken" a drone that doesn't belong to them, and clearly are not about to give it back.

So as you say, "law" doesn't really apply, it's more of a moral decision as to whether a country should spy on another country. We can clearly see the outcome of that decision here.

What's your point? Do you think Iran doesn't have spies?

My point is that Iran is being made out to be the "bad guy" because they've taken something important and supposedly secret that belongs to the USA and won't give it back.

I don't think a country is the bad guy when they are simply trying to stop another country from spying on them.

Iran is being made out to be the "bad guy" for stuff totally unrelated to this drone; I haven't seen anyone labeling the drone's capture itself as wrong. (Then again, this might be because I don't watch any TV news - maybe they're crazier.)

I'd be interested to know who, other than Iranians, considers Iran the "good guys."

America certainly isn't the good guy in the middle east. If there is a measure that puts America ahead I'd like to hear it. This is not, however, a defense of Iran. Can everyone involved be the bad guy?

Alright, I don't give a fuck one way or the other. You tell me what makes them the default bad guys and what makes US the default good guy or neutral guy?

I don't think the US is perfect by any stretch of the word. I just have a hard time imagining a third party deciding that Iran is the example they'd rather move towards if given the choice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Islamic_Rep... vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

> the "law' in "international law" does not mean the same meaning as the "domestic law" within a country's borders.

That's true. And also, the "law" in "domestic law" doesn't apply equally as people assume it does. Really, it's a huge fairy tale that "everyone is equivalent in the face of the [domestic] law", which for some reason many grown ups believe.

It's really a sad choice of words that the word "law" is used for both physical phenomena, where it i absolutely applied, and legal situations, where it applies mostly when it isn't inconvenient to the rulers (which is a word that better described what's usually called "leaders")

> 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

The Iranians are shooting themselves in the foot then by claiming that they jammed the navigation to bring the UAV down.

The US can then claim it was over protected airspace at the time and that the Iranian actions brought it into Iranian airspace.

Everyone spys on everyone. We do it with drones and satellites, they do it with people.

Doesn't mean it's right. In fact it's fucking wrong. The CIA should be abolished. And this saber-rattling against a country that poses no risk to us is disgusting and wrong. The US is the most dangerous country in the world and must be stopped.

Here's a contrarian view.

I would argue that mutual spying in general is a good thing and that it generally has the potential, properly managed, to prevent war. The problem has to do with leadership and less to do with spying itself.

During the cold war, both the US and USSR had extensive satellites deployed that would provide an early warning for the launch of ICBM's. As Lt. Robert Bowman pointed out in "Star Wars: A Defense Expert's Case Against the Strategic Defense Initiative," this had a stabilizing effect because both sides could be certain they were not being attacked and therefore would not be inclined to mistakenly counter-attack. Spying can have a similar effect in that it can provide additional reason to believe that another party is not in the process of preparing an attack.

The larger problem though is that geopolitics is real. We didn't invade Iraq for the reasons we were told. We did it for geopolitical and domestic political reasons, and every piece of data would be tortured enough that it would say what the government wanted it to say, even if no reasonable person could put all the data together and make it say what Bush wanted it to say. In this area then spying is beside the point.

We shouldn't forget that the CIA exists to offer a counterbalance to military intelligence which is more likely to rattle sabres than a civilian agency.

Did Bowman also point out Petrov Day and the dangers of these systems malfunctioning? ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/ )

I mostly agree with your comment; the CIA has been relatively benign compared to other agencies and the military at large. My own take on the moral implications of spying is that if you already have a Palantir, you might as well use it since more information is advantageous in the zero-sum games countries play. But I wouldn't go out of my way to find/build one--I think the resources could be spent to greater effect elsewhere in such a case.

Yes. In fact his big criticism of antisatellite missiles was that if the USSR knows we have the capability to take down their satellites, this adds additional failure conditions that could be mistaken for a prelude to an attack. So for example a satellite runs into a piece of space junk and is destroyed. Now you have to decide whether that was the result of hostile anti-satellite warfare (and a prelude to a nuclear first strike) or whether it is just an ordinary malfunction.

That spying on people is wrong and you don't believe it should be done is a laudable moral position and quite reasonable to expect out of the vast majority of the world's population.

That doesn't change the fact that it'd be an absolutely disastrous approach to running a county.

U.S. invading Iranian airspace is not as benign as you are pretending especially given it is not an isolated incident. It is one thing to have the neighborhood peeping tom looking in your window, another thing to have a serial killer rapist snooping inside your house. The U.S. government has aggressively worked to overthrow the Iranian government by setting U.S. public opinion against the Iranian government for possible military action. The U.S. has also installed sanctions, the 2007 congress funding of covert operations inside Iran, Iranian scientist assassinations, and the recent dubious Saudi assassination plot.

why do we need to spy on other governments unless we're going to war with somebody? The US has overthrown 50 governments since wwii. How about we srop doing that?

(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 most likely. The Global Hawk, for instance, uses inertial navigation as well as GPS. Spoofing GPS against that platform would be annoying to the people controlling it, it would not get you a free Global Hawk. It is a near-certainty that the Sentinel has a similar navigation system.).

Some clarification on these drones:

Some of them require a human being with Line Of Sight to land them. "Predators" (what a lovely name), for instance. This thing is basically a gigantic R/C plane, and a pretty nice one at that.

You taxi it to the runway, take it off, and fly it via remote control. There is a human watching it the entire time (although the human may not be in close proximity to the plane. The militarized versions, for instance, have pilots living in Nevada, and planes living in Afghanistan).

Another plane, called a "Global Hawk", is much larger, and requires almost no human intervention at all. You open the hanger door, press the go button, and then leave it alone.

It taxis itself to the runway, powers up, takes off, flies its mission, comes home, lands, taxis back to the hanger, and powers down.

If this article is accurate, it would mean that this drone model requires no human intervention, which makes sense if it's primarily a passive, camera-platform.

What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.

How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a "drone" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing.

(By that I mean a $30 'duino, $50 worth of gyros and accelerometers, and $60 worth of a GPS. Hey government, here's a cost cutting measure: hire me to build you some drones.)

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 < .002 deg/hr for $50 (or even $20,000) http://www51.honeywell.com/aero/common/documents/myaerospace...

I think you missed part of what I was saying.

Of course I don't have the requisite materials or fabrication equipment to build the type of inertial navigation equipment used in missiles.

My point was that, if the article is to be believed, and RQ-170 relies completely on GPS and gyros, then I have the stuff needed to build its guidance system.

(The point here being that of course I don't, and of course it's likely more complicated than a GPS, so the article is probably incorrect)

I plus +1'd your comment, I get what you were trying to say, sorry I came across wrong. I was trying to supplement it a bit by saying there are many tiers of UAV's. I was joking about you having crazy crap on your kitchen counter, but typed a bit too fast to make a point of me getting what you were saying.

You can see in my other comments that it is pretty nuts if they actually captured the plane the way they claim. Based my knowledge of navigation design, it seems to be pretty impossible to convince a properly designed plane that it is somewhere it isn't without turning off the inertial navigation equipment (what is done during testing in anechoic chambers).

I didn't get that entirely from the article. They had already cut off communications links, so it sounds like it was already running in some sort of backup mode, meaning that GPS and gyros were perhaps all it had left to go on.

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

> absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect,

I am also working in the area of government military contracting and I would claim your credibility in LM's competence is baffling. Are we talking about the same company here?

Absolutely. Lockheed's an enormous company, so generalizations are risky, but they sure do some low-quality engineering sometimes. Their Littoral Combat Ship program is a textbook example of a clusterfuck.

Exactly! Building GPS-guided RC drones is actually WAY simpler than most people realize (relatively). See: http://www.openpilot.org/, http://www.kkmulticopter.kr/

> 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.

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

"How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a "drone" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing."

I don't know how serious you are, but every state and local law enforcement agency in the US will be looking to buy smaller, more affordable drones for traffic and crime uses in the very immediate future (if they aren't already).

see: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/143144146/drone-technology-fin...

I know this is an aside to the original article ... I just wanted to say that, if you were serious, I would totally invest money into such an endeavor :)

What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.

GPS is pretty damn precise, especially once you add local ionosphere corrections (via WAAS or similar) and get to use the military signal. It's certainly good enough for navigating an airplane, because it's more accurate than what was in use before GPS (VOR).

Edit: relevant diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Accuracy_of_Navigation_Sys...

It may be accurate, but it can be spoofed.

Barely related, but VOR is freaking amazingly cool. Makes flying a lot of fun :)

Yeah. I'm not a pilot but am a bit nostalgic for "the old way". A modern autopilot system that's linked to GPS will let you type in waypoints and then it will just fly to them, keeping the heading adjusted to account for the wind data it gets from a satellite weather uplink.

What happened to airmanship? :)

Doesn't everyone get to use the "military signal" now?

The LSB's used to be encrypted, but the codes are public now?

I believe what happened was that some hackers went to known locations on the planet, listened to the signal, then used these pairings to reverse engineer it.

Eventually it was simply declassified.

So, they spoofed GPS and jammed the rest of the communications to make it land automatically. Given that there are test transmitters for GPS devices used when consumer devices are being created it's not a surprise that they managed to do this. Not very long ago there was a GPS jamming exercise in the UK done on a military range.

I realize that as a Westerner I shouldn't be rooting for the Iranians but if they did spoof GPS, jam the rest of the communications and get this thing to land thinking it was at its home base then it's at least a neat hack.

Also, in the article there's a quote from someone dissing the Iranians' technical ability. This seems like a mistake. Iran is not a 'stone age' country like Afghanistan.

Hmm, the GPS signal the military uses is supposed to be encrypted and un-spoofable.

I wonder if Iran cracked it. If so, can the US reset the key easily?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Precision_code

The P code is on a different frequency, so the Iranians could have just jammed the P code, and then presumably the drone would rely on the the unencrypted C/A code which they spoofed.

Sigh..

I hope it was not that insecure.

All of the military GPS receivers also use the civilian signal to initialize their position to lock on to the military encrypted signal. I would assume that in the event that they lose the P code, that they would revert to the C/A code.

If a human being lost GPS signal, they'd start using landmarks, or based on their last known position, just use dead reckoning to get over friendly airspace, then ask for help. Programming that into a drone takes time and so costs money. Maybe the drone was the victim of cost cutting?

Still a horrible security design if that is the case.

Simply jamming something should not by-pass an authentication mechanism.

I don't know their actual hacking mechanism, but a replay attack could be done such that valid but incorrect GPS data is sent to the drone. The gist of it is that one records signals coming from GPS satellites and retransmits them. It could be transmitted with enough power to drown out any signal from actual GPS satellites.

There should be a time component in the signal that wouldn't match the internal clock, but maybe enough satellites saying the same thing would trigger a self correction... or it would disregard all GPS data.

Time is literally what GPS satellites are broadcasting.

Yep: "Radio waves are electromagnetic energy, which means they travel at the speed of light (about 186,000 miles per second, 300,000 km per second in a vacuum). The receiver can figure out how far the signal has traveled by timing how long it took the signal to arrive." - http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/travel/gps2.htm

I think there is no need to hack the signal. It can be done by capturing and delaying signals. What you need for that is

1) the location of satellites. You can probably get it from the commercial signal.

2) transmission system, which overpowers signals from satellites. Many amateurs have it too.

3) location of the receiver you want to distract. I have no idea, how this works, but apparently it is possible.

4) program that calculates right delays for each signal so that plane will locate itself incorrectly.

Maybe the droid was programmed so, that GPS overrides other locationing devices, if it is working and the droid thought that GPS was working.

As jgrahamc says: "I realize that as a Westerner I shouldn't be rooting for the Iranians but if they did spoof GPS, jam the rest of the communications and get this thing to land thinking it was at its home base then it's at least a neat hack."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_attack

I'm not sure, if I'm thinking this way too simply, but I don't think any of those countermeasures work in this case. I don't know, if satellite gets signals from GPS-device (I don't think so), when using military signal, but anyway it will get exactly the same signal, as it would get in non-disturbed system. Similarly the droid will have exactly the same signal from satellite, only delayed.

When commercial GPS-devices begin to locate themselves, they need four satellites for the process: Three for the coordinates and one for time. I believe, that military system works the same way. If you cut down the signals for a while, the droid will, when the signal (delayed one) comes back, maybe adjust it's clock a couple of 1/10000ths of second to get GPS-locationing back in business. And after that the signal transmitter decides, where the droid will fly.

Many guesses here, but this is just one suggestion free for discussion, how the system might work...

Maybe there's a safety fallback to normal GPS when the encrypted GPS goes out. The alternative would be no GPS at all in which case they'd need to send an actual human in to shoot it down or capture it.

you don't have to understand a signal to jam it.

unless it also has frequency hopping when it senses a jam.

how would the satellite in space detect a jam on the ground ? we're talking gps jamming. state your source

The chances of this machine relying completely on GPS for navigation is closer to none than slim.

I'm not saying the article is completely wrong, just that it's probably missing a giant part of what happened.

You are likely correct. I doubt it relies on GPS for complete navigation, but it might rely on GPS to correct drift in an inertial system in which case if you spoofed GPS a little bit for a while (hours?) you might be able to trick the drone into thinking it was somewhere near where it should have been.

Given that Iran and Afghanistan have a border and the Iranians say it was captured in the NE of Iran then it's not impossible that they simply managed to get it to drift off course into their territory and land.

If course it is missing a giant part of what happened. Do you think the Iranians would tell about all aspects of it to a newspaper?

Not very long ago there was a GPS jamming exercise in the UK done on a military range

I am on The List for notification of these exercises, and they are happening with increasing frequency. Someone has decided that a GPS denial scenario is looking probable and is preparing accordingly.

There is some more information on GPS jamming at http://www.ausairpower.net/TE-GPS-Guided-Weps.html.

One American analyst ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was “like dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”

An ox-cart technology culture that is allied with China and Russia. I hope this kind of hubris is counterbalanced by more realistic attitudes in the defense world.

Wasn't OXCART the code word for the 60's spy plane program that operated the U-2 and SR-71?

Hmmm... http://www.paperlessarchives.com/a12.html

Excellent catch, and linkage. Thanks.

I wouldn't downplay Iran's technological capability as this anonymous analyst seems to. By Middle Eastern (and developing world) standards, it's a fairly technologically advanced society - GDP per capita 4 times that of Egypt, 3 times that of Iraq - and this is a country where (unlike, say, Iraq in the 80s or Syria in the 2000s) its nuclear development program and missiles are indigenous.

That said, I'm sure China and Russia would also pay very well in both cash and political favors to get a look at the drone, which might end up being more worthwhile to the Iranians than pulling it apart themselves.

I don't know if you visited the countries you mentioned nor if you have any idea of their academic standards for example.

Many people in here are used to american technological society and have no idea what it's like in other parts of the world. In countries like Iran the huge majority of the population never red a book, can't really read and write much more than the very basics, most of the people haven't assimilated the concept of multiplication, just to give you an example. I'm from a country way more developed than iran in technological/scientific terms and I always have trouble to explain to Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, etc. how non tech-savy other parts of the world are.

I wouldn't downplay _the lack of_ technological capability. That's more like it.

I don't know what happen with that drone, but so far I've seen zero evidence and 100% speculation. That is a fact. I might be wrong, but there's no single bit of proof of anything.

I've been to Egypt (a few weeks pre-revolution) - it was shockingly ill-run and undeveloped. I've also been to Turkey - judging from the statistics and technical accomplishments (adjusting for sanctions), a country on a similar level of development to Iran. The difference was astounding. The general level of education and development seemed lower than in developed and semi-developed societies (my frames of reference being, respectively, the United States and Israel) but it was most of the way there.

More significantly, (though anecdotally) I know in the Bay Area several Iranians - educated up to Bachelor's level in Iranian universities - who are very capable of keeping up at the top of their fields.

Indeed. It seems to me that even if Iran fails to get much useful out of it, there'll be buyers queuing up for it ready to pay anything.

Payment would be in the form of alliances and protection from US aggression.

It is suprising that many americans, for the lack of a better term, seem to be "butthurt" over this event.

Look at this news on reddit for example, first it was ridiculed, and speculation was high that it might have been a crash or accident, that the Iranians had luck, and that it in fact never happened, just propaganda. Then the Iranians showed it, and many comments said "its old tech any way". Why the butthurtness?

And now, "the takeover wasnt so high tech anyway".

tl;dr - I don't think it's "butthurt" so much as people making it up as they go along.

There is sometimes a cultural or sub-cultural imperative to have and express an opinion on something even when there isn't enough information to go on.

I'm not sure how much of that is being American and how much of that is being on the Internet[0], but essentially it's not enough to just read the news anymore. If you don't have an opinion or belief (preferably a strong one) many people will regard you as ignorant, even if you're working from the same set of facts as they are.

When there's not enough information, it seems that people look first to familiar memes or established narratives. When it comes to US-Iranian relations, it's usually either the idea of American military supremacy (so it must have been an accident or Iranian bluffing) or the idea that the US intends to go to invade Iran any day now (so it's somehow an American ploy to start a war). There is a grain of truth in each which surely plays into the whole truth, but there are far too many unknowns for anybody commenting on the Internet to say with the kind of confident certainty that we so often do.

A site like Reddit (or HN, or anything with a comment box) amplifies this, because people like posting comments, and how can you comment on a story if you haven't decided what your opinion is about it? So people skim the article or just read the headline[1], draw conclusions which may be highly speculative, and then post whatever they think based on at most a few minutes of thought. And they might do this a dozen times a day, for years. So it becomes really natural for people to dash off whatever the easiest thing they can think to say is given the context, even as the context changes and the story evolves. On a popular story you might get dozens or hundreds of people saying the same handful of things.

[0] Or how much of it is what some call "Male Answer Syndome". [1] Check out the length of headlines on /r/politics/.

Some people on Reddit != All of Reddit.

Reddit != America.

The OP was clearly describing the hive-mind of reddit, which does in fact follow American ideologies due to the overwhelming number of Americans who do use it.

However at the same time a lot of them claim to be critical of US govt's policies on war, drones, extra-judicial killings and so on. All that taken into account is surprising that they as a group would rush to discredit Iranians' capability and ridicule this situation.

It is interesting that they are essentially playing along to the US govt. propaganda. The govt. knew what had happened but lied, telling the media a malfunction occurred, and the drone 'drifted' randomly into Iranian territory. I expected them to lie and make shit up. That's fine. But is is interesting that groups liberals are also doing that, without being coerced or forced to do so. It illustrates an interesting process that happens were supposedly fairly liberal individuals still end up White House lapdogs without even realizing it.

It is also funny how after more evidence comes out, neither the media, nor say, Redditors, go back and admit their previous mistake, instead the strategy moves to "ridicule".

It is interesting that they are essentially playing along to the US govt. propaganda. [...] It is also funny how after more evidence comes out, neither the media, nor say, Redditors, go back and admit their previous mistake, instead the strategy moves to "ridicule".

You shouldn't under-estimate how much propaganda being done by a variety of states is being done online through the use of sock puppets. While I'm not trying to claim it's happening on reddit specifically I wouldn't be shocked to find out it was. This is one of the (afaik) stated main purposes for the "persona management stations" that various US military & intelligence services have been procuring and using. I've only heard it framed as foreign language propaganda targeted at conflict areas, but it isn't hard to see the temptation to target US based sites of International appeal.

Does that mean that our internet has been taken over by sock puppets?

When we no longer can trust that the other guy is indeed a guy/girl just like us, but now is an algorithm, carefully crafted for a specific purpose.

Communication suffers, the internet may no longer be a meeting ground.

In the early to mid 2000s, the US rendered military aid to Georgia, in both training and equipment. This included unmanned aircraft.

In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, and presumably captured some of those aircraft.

No security system should rely on the secrecy of its function, but in practice, many do. If any agency in the world can break the security of US UAVs, it'd be Russia.

Remind me again how the Russians and Iranians get along?

Every security system relies on some secrecy to function. For example, we keep passwords and private keys secret for a reason. The question is what pieces should be kept secret. Biometrics has a pretty impressive false positive rate, so are generally considered the weakest form of strong security.

But this then brings one to the heart of the problem.

Correction, in 2008, Russia invaded PART of Georgia. If my memory serves, they only invaded as far as one military base, and that only temporary.

No, the Russians occupied several Georgian cities, including Poti, Gori, Senakie, and Zugdidi.

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) tell you should be, something is definitely fishy and you should self destruct.

Spoofing GPS signals is an interesting idea, but falling for them continues to be unacceptable for a UAV full of very sensitive information.

Oh good. I can make drones self destruct with a gps spoofer.

Careful, you might trigger its berserker mode.

really? I wonder how hard it is to get one near the launch site!!

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.

Perhaps they are hoping they can crack the communication channels

I'm also very curious about this. Even though this is a cheaper drone, some simple voting scheme should be in place with multiple inertial nav systems. That seems fairly typical in the UAV world.

This all seems really fishy. You'd think if this was really top-secret level equipment, there would be several failsafes and an inevitable self-destruct mechanism in the event it was out of contact enough to reasonably assume capture. The fact it's wholly intact makes me wonder if it's some sort of honeypot.

No program is going to take their long dwell time drones that need every ounce for batteries and pack them full of explosives.

can't you make the batteries explosive?

would be a nice hack.

I don't quite understand how CS Monitor can vet any source inside the Iranian government as being non propaganda.

It may be propaganda, but it also has some plain technical claims that may be independently verifiable.

Tis the season for peace on Earth, or at least some good sportsmanship.

If they hacked it as described, the engineers who pulled it off deserve our congratulations on a hack well played.

If it's all some elaborate ruse for the sake of internal PR, well, good to know those exist outside the U.S. also. :)

There is a campaign underway to raise funding for the next round of drone development. These stories are hitting the press to help drum up support for spending on drone R&D and production.

There are also stories that are intended to pave the way for drones being used on American soil.

Christian Science Monitor: is this a reputable source known for good journalism?

I too have been skeptical of this publication. Others have told me that despite the name, it is quite good.

The title is more meant to be "The Monitor" but it is owned by the Christian Science church. That is why the domain is csmonitor.

Their FAQ page also says:

"Is the Monitor a religious publication?

No, it’s a real news organization owned by a church – The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Mass., USA. Everything in the Monitor is international and US news and features, except for one religious article in the weekly magazine and Daily News Briefing – a version of which has appeared each day since 1908, at the request of the Monitor’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy. In an age of corporate conglomerates dominating the news media, the Monitor’s combination of church ownership, public-service mission, and commitment to covering the world (not to mention the fact that it was founded by a woman shortly after the turn of the 20th century, when US women didn’t yet have the vote!) gives the Monitor a uniquely independent voice in journalism."

In spite of the title - Yes. It's a very well written newspaper that I've been reading my whole life.

(My father used to make us read it to him on the way to school even...)

They are well known for being anti-sensationalism. The religion bit has no bearing on the paper except that an article on religion must be in every issue, but they don't attempt to advance/preach the christian scientist faith in any way.

Yes it is. It is one of the best US papers and is read internationally. It doesn't have an agenda, but is a little conservative. In other words, the traditional values of journalism are still held there - like breaking stories and original research and writing. I think importance of web-publishing there, and its success, is fascinating.

Yes. CSM is actually a very good newspaper.

This page 2 comment is making me not believe what I am reading. Data stream is not encrypted? Can anyone confirm?

The US military has reportedly been aware of vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.

Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all drone data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant laptops loaded with days' worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that they were "subject to listening and exploitation."

edit: fixed the format

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/predator-dro...

Thanks for the link. Wow, I am surprised they didn't fix it so far.

I thought that the "unencrypted data streams" was video channel, not the control channel. Is that not true?

You are correct. As far as we know, the "unencrypted data" was just video, NOT control codes.

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 drone. Just a possibility.

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.

The location of their research facilities is itself valuable.

+100

The Iranians have obviously never seen Troy or Holy Grail. Horse, rabbit, stealth plane, all the same really.

Or they could have its storage seeded with misinformation, or information that tricks those who obtain it into leaking information of their own. For example: http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/4/2537647/darpa-fake-documen...

But it seems more likely that they really didn't intend to lose the thing in one piece like that.

That does not seem plausible. But there is the possibility that this is a clever ploy to give erroneous technology to Russian and China...

Given that the NYT is reporting that top secret documents were just left in a trailor in Iraq by the ton, I suspect that it's more likely the drone was landed in Iran by accident.

this sounds odd. other reports said that the final landing for these drones is done with a local, direct link (which was a possible candidate for how it was hacked), but this article implies (if i am reading it right) that by faking GPS it was misled into thinking it was landing in its normal place.

also, in the linked article it says that the underbelly was damaged because the altitudes differed by a few metres, but gps doesn't offer that kind of vertical resolution (as far as i know, particularly not from something that cannot sit in one place and integrate over time. this is (partly) why GPS is not used for landing - it's simply not precise enough).

perhaps the gps was spoofed, but it was only part of something more complex? like enabling the radio control for landing because the drone thought it was near the airfield?

[edit] this seems to be the original source that mentions direct landing control, although i've never seen that site before (am pretty sure i read it on the bbc or guardian): http://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/12/how-iran-probably-acqui...

Some of the speculation I've heard is that these drones have an auto-return-and-land mode that could be triggered by successfully jamming the communications links. It may be that the auto-land was designed with the hope that the legitimate operator would take over with a direct control when then drone got close enough to home base. It may be that the thing wasn't really able to make a completely graceful landing on its own.

Sounds plausible to me.

Russian-made GPS jammers have been reportedly on the market for over a decade now.

Alternatively, it might also be enough to simply fly your own plane and GPS receiver some relative distance away from the drone and rebroadcast the signals received from there with a higher strength. Of course, this type of forwarding attack could end up with the Iranians landing a plane of their own at the US base. That would be bonus points for style. :-)

I don't get it. With a budget of millions for these UAVs was it so hard to fit the thing with an IRS unit, or even an older INS unit to augment the GPS? Then one could add a single if statement checking if the GPS location has diverged greatly from where it was in the last NMEA statement?

What am I missing here???

It no doubt has an EGI - a combined GPS INS. It will depend entirely on the software interpreting that data.

> “We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

The thought of this leads to some conspiratorial thoughts: from various sources, we might know where a missile originated from, but who knows what might happen to it during flight?

I for one welcome the next generation GPS satellites that the military will no doubt now put up.

Edit: It appears the first GPS III satellite will be launched in 2014.

It almost seems that someone read my comment here on HN a few days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3330669

Why is it unpainted?

I've seen a lot of these drone stories and discussion threads. The most interesting thing about them is the assumption that America has the right to violate other countries territory.

If this is indeed a problem, just put a secure QR code on every runway. Easy enough.

HEY ECHELON

This is the joke of the century. LOL

This is what the US congress should be investigating instead of passing bills that have no chance of becoming law or reaffirming "in god we trust".

Why not just EMP it to crash it and collect it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compres...

Because you want it intact, and don't want its circuitry cooked?

Meh, seems very simple to me (after some research).

Allow me to speculate.

- American Drone was destroyed with a hack tentative

- Iran built a replica for internal advertising of nationalism and for international press

- America won't comment and say it was a replica because it needs all the uneducated "Right" to believe Iran has some "power" so there is a reason to invade.

Come on haven't you guys seeing this movie before??

(updated for format)

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