High-end CNC machines can't be moved without manufacturers' permission
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
Maybe the GPS is so it can receive targeted ads. "Customers who machined this part also ordered..." ;-)
So, I think where contracts are in place, they have every right to lock the machine down. Which is probably part of any contract. But, putting aside what I was saying about nukes, I can't see why, if there is no contract, an owner has to have his machine bricked if (s)he wants to move it. Again, unless these machines are specifically restricted by law or international treaty type things.
Incidentally, if you're looking for easy stockroom work, a hosiery factory has no heavy lifting...
The reason why machinists who know only a little about machining demand you must level a lathe bed or it won't work, insist on that old wives tale, is because a simple "cheap" way to prove the lathe bed isn't twisted is to simply plop a precision level on various parts of the lathe bed and various directions... If the lathe bed is level everywhere, it must be a flat plane (well, plus or minus curvature of the earth over 100 foot monsters, obviously)
Obviously machine tools don't have to be level; otherwise you'd never see them on ships, deep sea platforms, mobile "back of truck" repair trucks, things like that. They have other, somewhat more laborious or expensive ways to determine and shim flatness.
If you made the flimsiest imaginable 3-d printer, then sag might be relevant... however you're talking about beasts of a machine that can drop 10-100 rotating HP and not twist or distort... anything less than 45 degrees isn't going to matter.
Now one problem I have personally seen is some CNC gear has what boils down to a conveyor belt that streams out metal chips. So if you mounted it 10 degrees tilted, you might have chips not fall on the conveyor belt. This is usually a simple adjustment to various guards / guides / baffles. Its not a very serious concern.
As a cross industry comparison, learned helplessness is a common feature in IT/CS land, where your average luser is extremely proud to not know anything about his computer that he uses 8 hours per day, and no one expects him to know anything either. However in machine world its somewhat unusual to have IT-like levels of learned helplessness, so the average machinist dude can quite easily handle shimming a lathe or adjusting tilts and such.
Machine tools do need a nice really really flat surface to work on when you working to micrometer or single thou's of tolerance even the smallest tilt in the x or y plane is unacceptable - you probably also want a very stable temp environment.
ps I never thought id have the chance to use the old unit "thou's" in a hn comment
I just added thou's is as a courtesy to this in the USA who still use imperial
In any case, I wish that Congress would step up and put law around the issue of whether one can "sell" things with restricted use. E-books, for instance, are really leased rather than sold. A sane legal system would give teeth to that legal distinction.
tl;dr if you sell expensive machinery then do everything in your power to prevent buyers from reselling.
edit: Found them. http://www.asseta.com/
It's much more likely that this was a response to the very real and well documented problem of illegal exports. Another Japanese company, Mitutoyo, was caught several times illegally exporting these machines to embargoed countries, including North Korea and Iran. Some of Mitutoyo's executives were jailed for this.[1] Adding tamper-proofing and tracking is a great way to make sure that regain confidence and avoid prison.
Edit: I'm not sure why this was downvoted. A representative from Mori said something similar on the board linked to by the original article:
"Regarding the device, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Worst case for a negligent violation would be Dr. Mori himself spending time in the slammer. That along is enough motivation for DMG MORI to follow the regulation very carefully. Other reasons include all of those stated above!
btw, no need to waste time on bypassing it. It is pretty solid. We have to make it so Iran, N. Korea, etc's best can't bypass it." [2]
I think that this is a perfectly plausible explanation and don't think that the real ulterior motive is controlling resale, especially when other foreign competitors do not have the same restrictions.
[1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2006/09/02/news/mitutoyo-ti...
[2] http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-m...
Also it's not very difficult to trick a GPS sensor into thinking its somewhere else as long as your signal is a lot better then the ones coming from the satellite so i would disagree with them being solid.
and that's probably the reason why they include a gyro and shut down the machine if it is moved at all, regardless of what the GPS says.
A gyroscope doesn't do much besides detect if it was moved it can't tell where it was moved so you're basically relying on spoof-able input.
"The INS is initially provided with its position and velocity from another source (a human operator, a GPS satellite receiver, etc.), and thereafter computes its own updated position and velocity by integrating information received from the motion sensors. The advantage of an INS is that it requires no external references in order to determine its position, orientation, or velocity once it has been initialized."
I find it interesting that the GPS is even receiving signals inside of a machine shop. One would think that the interference from the machine itself, not to mention the typically metal building, would attenuate the already weak signals pretty badly.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#Erro... [1] http://www.aerostudents.com/files/avionics/navigationBasicsA... (scroll down to bottom for tuning discussion)
Have you ever seen such a workshop being rearranged? The people doing it might - for instance - not place the machine on a good enough quality of flooring, or they might be moving to a facility that is totally inappropriate (no good foundations) because they aren't talking to the right people and have a dim and naive view of machinery...
Also my experience of such rearrangements is that they are not to improve workflow, but more usually to satisfy some new management type's desire to have an impact on the workplace.
In short, I think this is prudent - it at least prevents a classic engineering management cock up - and protects the machine manufacturer from having their name tarnished by the sloppy practices of their customers.
The case where people know what they are doing is the exception and not the case in my experience...
- a GPS lock can easily be defeated by the earnest with a GPS simulator, about a $2k fix. This isn't a great solution for the honest buyer, but anyone with ill intention could easily activate these in Kansas and re-export to a controlled state.
(edit: a GPS sim can't help with the gyros, so maybe its a better "lock" than I originally reckoned ;-)
- there are excellent "open-source" substitutes available. The Mechmate community is thriving (http://mechmate.com) and these plans make it possible for a DIYer to build their own 4 axis CNC with tolerances to a thousandth of an inch or better. My father-in-law is a a cabinet maker (http://woodforyou.net) who built one of these for his business a few years ago, here's a demo video showing his results... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU3-6AapV3I
(Edit 2: I wrote this before I had an appreciation for the difference between a CNC mill and a CNC router. The Mechmate is a CNC router and used for very different purposes than a CNC mill. Anyways, comment might still have some value for some. Sorry for the noise ;-)
If the machinery experiences significant acceleration in an earthquake, it's not necessarily intact or safe to operate afterwards. The enclosing machine shop is also not likely to be in any state to continue operations if something as large as the pictured CNC machine has been thrown across the room. I don't buy that this issue is a big deal either.
From a software freedom standpoint, yes, this is terrible. But I don't think it's as much of a problem for the owner as the parent suggests.
If the lockdown mechanism is GPS, then it should be clear where the actual machine is, so there shouldn't be any need to lock it down unless it's in a black zone.
And what happens if the manufacturer goes belly-up?
The reasoning is fairly obvious - they dont want to see dumb missiles getting upgraded to a DIY guided ballistic missile thanks to a $100 Garmin gaffa taped to the side and a cheap flight control computer.
The intention was for a GPS device to disable itself if it was traveling faster than 1k knots AND above 60k feet, not traveling faster than 1k knots OR above 60k feet. Unfortunately, many GPS devices improperly implement this as an OR condition, rather than an AND condition. This becomes problematic when using a GPS in a high-altitude weather balloon to determine altitude and location, which a few friends and I did a couple years ago. We had to be very careful when selecting the GPS we used to avoid this pitfall.
We used a UBlox5, which we purchased from diydrones.com. This was in 2009, so that particular model is now outdated. Both Adafruit and SparkFun now sell devices which are explicitly listed as being HAB-friendly. There's also good guide at http://showcase.netins.net/web/wallio/GPSrcvrsvs60kft.htm. That page states that SiRF-I and II are known to fail above 60k feet, and that some SiRF-III-based receives fail, while others don't.
(If you happen to be in the Bay Area, I'd be happy to meet up and give you guys some pointers sometime; drop me a private email.)
The receivers use other satellites. They have to anyway: You can't get a fix with only one satellite.
In practice there are enough satellites that these considerations are theoretical. Most situations that would involve limited satellites also introduce stuff like multi path reflections that further degrade position accuracy.
The CNC must be reachable from the programmers computers as well as from the remote connections that manufacturers sells as maintenance. Needless to say, it's a nightmare for any decent CISO.
Of course the CNC manufacturers' don't make it easy nor encourage the installation of third party securing tools. Very big companies spend a lot of time thinking on how to secure such machines on their network without touching the OS, and I've not yet heard of someone having found a simple and powerful securing policy (not involving a complex vlan implementation). The result is that, with some hacker abilities and a known target, one could worm its way threw the CNC OS of a lot of companies who don't know nor want to secure their network.
If one fellow colleague working on the manufacturer side happen to read that comment, I would be happy to push the discussion further.
There might be a market for a $50-100, two-port firewall/DMZ solution built on one of these ARM chips:
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co... http://www.ti.com/product/am3357
I have yet to find such a solution for sale.
How exactly are they setting this up that it's complex? Isolated VLANs with VPN access are a routine solution to this kind of problem. A decent network engineer would probably have it done before you finish telling him what you want.
(If instead of a decent network engineer, I had to do it, I'd just be finding the password for the switch I hadn't logged into for a year. The configuration would be done about 15 minutes later.)
Devil advocate: people in charge of IT stuff there are project or support guys, almost never network engineers. Either they don't care about serious security or they simply have no clue on how they should do it. And when they outsource their IT security, they're so bad at choosing that the solution implemented is worst than doing nothing.
When I have the chance to chat with them about those subjects, the common position is almost always "we don't get why the machine manufacturer don't sells us a secured solution".
"US arms export regulations force CNC manufacturers to implement anti-relocation lockout mechanisms"
Of course it's not just the manufacturers being dicks; they implement that or they can't import to the USA.
That this story might be explained with regulation is not much of an surprise. No US politician would dream of publicly stand for the view point of taking down private ownership and giving the control to corporations, even if regulations then can easier be enforced. They would be called communist and fascist, and any political career would be over. However, circumvention of property law is not the same thing, so it enables many new way to control what previous was hard if not impossible.
Even the linked thread said it uses gyros without mentioning GPS.
- "All of our Citizen swiss lathes have the same GPS feature." (http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-maho-cnc/mori-ellison-gyroscope-unlocking-273841/#post2141101)
- "Why can't they simply check for "Out of USA" or "in $BannedCountry now"? They do have GPS, right?" (http://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/dmg-mori-gildemeister-maho-cnc/mori-ellison-gyroscope-unlocking-273841/#post2141382)What does the fact they don't install them on US machines have to do with them not using it as a business opportunity? This is a non-sequitur.
Since this guy hasn't heard of them being used to enforce finance deals means absolutely nothing, how could anyone cancel out a point because of that?
And his third point skips out on the fact that adding this functionality to the machine can cause extra problems.
The article mentions that gyros are also used, so I suspect that the company prefers to have a defensible list of purchasers, with the confidence that this would not change without their knowledge.
Similar in results to a blacklist, but somewhat more reliable from the manufacturer's perspective.
But I suspect that the machining to make something that goes boom is probably well within the means of a traditional machine shop.
My main knowledge of , er, building nukes (hello GCHQ) comes from the widely accepted to be well researched book by Tom Clancy, The Sum of All Fears. Apparently it is a very good account of how to make a nuke, but with some very crucial details missed out of changed. And, yeah, very fair enough.
What I got from reading that book only once was that, even for a nuke bomb made from the remnants of an old nuke missile ("hacked, if you will") was that a fair amount of very, very high precision machining was necessary. In the plot, it was a massive big deal to get the right machine tools (Swiss, IIRC), and that alone was a massive task. Not just getting the tools, but getting one person with the skills necessary to do that machining.
Now, could well be the case the the precision needed to make a nuke is much higher than the machines mentioned in the article, don't know. Also could be that in that book plot, they needed very high precision to maximise the yield from old material, and of course perhaps a relatively small amount of material. So, its quite possible my point is redundant.
Another thought. Might be that the machine tools in the book were manual, not CNC. Might be that you needed high precision tools and a highly skilled machinist. So two things to required to make the bomb. Might be that now you dont need the skills because high spec CNC enabled less skilled people to do the work. So, that might be even more reason to keep tabs on the machines.
And thats all I know(, or think I know). Im merely suggesting that this might be a good reason to bolt down high precision CNC machines tools.
Achieving fusion is tricky and requires extremely precise machining (you basically have to build a perfect sphere). The detonation condition for fission is simply a critical mass of U-235 sitting in one place. Typical design is two piles of uranium in a container, separated by a lead wall. TNT blows the wall and drives the piles into each other; nature does the rest.
Fortunately, enriching uranium is a massive (expensive, time-consuming, and not particularly subtle) operation. Really only within the reach of states. But if you got your hands on weapons-grade uranium, the bomb part wouldn't be hard at all.
Source: my high school chem teacher.
Even the simplest nuclear weapons design is slightly more involved than that - the gun-based design used in the "Little Boy" bomb that destroyed Hiroshima used an actual section of gun barrel to fire one chunk of uranium at the other.
More modern designs of fission bombs, either as stand-alone weapons or as primaries for H-bombs, are actually pretty complex - balancing the need to be efficient (plutonium and U235 are rather expensive), light, robust and safe is a non-trivial problem.
The W88 warhead with its prolate (egg-shaped) primary is the most advanced nuclear weapon that has had design details leaked to the public:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88
In the case of the Sum of All Fears the terrorists were trying to build a strategic level bomb (i.e. hundreds of kt) using a fusion boosted fission design to try and start a global war - so they were actually trying to build something relatively advanced, not just a basic bomb.
Edit: Another real problem with working with plutonium is that it is fairly nasty stuff to deal with - I can recommend the book "Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West" to get some idea of the horrors of working with plutonium on an industrial scale:
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Real-Killing-Rocky-Nuclear/dp/0...
Or they make submarine propellers or something... you get the idea!
So, free trade with Iran and let everyone have nice safe nukes, right?
Oddly enough, that would be my position, but for very, very different reasons.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57586991-93/u.s-lifts-ban-o...
However, high precision CNC machines are useful in a wide range of high-tech applications, and keeping Iran poorer makes the rate at which they can gain power slower. Harder to make smaller or more powerful jet engines, harder to make centrifuges for nuclear enrichment, harder to make more advanced computing fabs - and so on.
If you can make it more expensive for Iran to advance to a particular level, then your investment in your own technologies puts you further ahead when they get there. If you get to cheap anti-ICBM defences first, then the threat of nukes is somewhat neutered, for instance. If you get to jet engines small enough for high performance combat drones first, then the threat of whatever airforce Iran can muster matters less. And so on.
I would imagine that the reasoning behind such embargoes covers more grounds than just whether you can stop someone getting nukes or the like ever and has more to do with balance of power in general.
Yikes. Classic Holdup Problem. There are certainly ways to force inventory checks without GPS software locks; this must have been implemented because of the desire to have actual remote 'kill' capability. What I don't understand is the line of sight issues with (actual) GPS sensors. If the machine is blocked from the birds...like it would typically be indoors...something seems odd.
If we've given up on growing up as a species, and now believe that humanity's only hope of survival is to limit the spread of information, then we're well and truly doomed. And, sadly, it's probably for the best. After all, who wants to live in a dystopian, nerfed society full of imprisoned intellects? Who wants a bunch of angry apes who're all one bad day from unleashing Armageddon loping around with warp engines and antimatter bombs and black hole generators?
As a side note... reading the commentary on this story is both intriguing and disheartening. The "hacker" mentality that apologizes for, and is comforted by, this sort of manufacturer-imposed limitation on an owned product, this denial of the right to tinker, is a very different mentality than was common when I earned my stripes. Have legally-imposed culture changes like the DMCA really corrupted our community so much? Have constant, overblown reminders of the threat of terrorism rendered us so fearful of each other? Could an individual raised in a community with this mentality ever produce open, populist-enabling technologies, PGP and P2P and DeCSS and modchips? IP itself? Are we still hackers, or are we all just consumers, now?
Which is why - at least according to those awesome TV shows - parts in high-end vehicles and machines are checked via precise 3D measuring instruments as part of the quality control process. Just pointing that out. Pretty sure few companies fully trust CNC machines to deliver perfect results all the time.
But again, in 15 years all these codes will be lost by the manufacturer itself, so your main point is valid.
I don't see what's to be gained by causing the machines to fail if they've been moved to the other end of a factory.
http://www.auilr.org/pdf/4/4-1-8.pdf THE TOSHIBA-KONGSBERG INCIDENT (pdf)
Owners should have this right.
I'm interested in the security implications of this
What does gyro sensor lockdown have to do with malware?
the mills are designed to be opaque to their owners
You're not really the owner if somebody can lock you out.
lest they disable the gyro/GPS
Disabling the sensor would probably trigger the lockdown.
Like many things, it depends. If the device is supported by the vendor, and requires very high precision such that jarring it could un-calibrate it, then this is perfectly reasonable, otherwise support costs would become prohibitively expensive for everyone. Why would they care if you've bought it? Because they are protecting their reputation.
Consider the situation of the typical Windows desktop that becomes more and more unusable as the user installs more and more toolbars and other malware. Windows takes the blame for it, but the problem would just go away if it prevented random stuff being installed.