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The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw si

by jsm386 17y ago

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.

dotBen 17y ago
This is actually a deeper problem - we (the US/UK/Western world) assumes the middle east doesn't have the same level of technical competency as us. Iran is a pretty well educated country, and while Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't have the same level of education in the tech/science areas, there are many sympathizers who are well educated -- including educated in UK, US, etc. There's actually a lot of comparisons to be drawn here with startup culture vs big business. Once again the smaller, less resourced are able to bring down the big players by being more nimble and not feeling the need to build everything "in house". To the "in house" point - the US probably spent high $100ks of mine and other tax payers money building viewing software for these drones vs the insurgents who use $25 Russian shareware. Now, I'm not saying that the government should be running SkyCatcher to view streams - but I bet they didn't include opensource options into their video viewer solution that would have saved $$$ in upfront and ongoing maintenance costs.
jmatt 17y ago
Wow, It's amazing they couldn't fix this over the last decade. Even a simple obfuscation, anything is better than raw data that is so easily viewable and worse verifiable. I would assume there is plenty of people with experience encrypting and decrypting radio / satellite signals for the military in the US. Maybe the problem lies in it not being a software problem, but rather some horrid design that relegates it to hardware. Either way now that this is public knowledge it needs to be fixed appropriately.

by jsm386 17y ago

dotBen 17y ago

This is actually a deeper problem - we (the US/UK/Western world) assumes the middle east doesn't have the same level of technical competency as us. Iran is a pretty well educated country, and while Iraq and Afghanistan doesn't have the same level of education in the tech/science areas, there are many sympathizers who are well educated -- including educated in UK, US, etc. There's actually a lot of comparisons to be drawn here with startup culture vs big business. Once again the smaller, less resourced are able to bring down the big players by being more nimble and not feeling the need to build everything "in house". To the "in house" point - the US probably spent high $100ks of mine and other tax payers money building viewing software for these drones vs the insurgents who use $25 Russian shareware. Now, I'm not saying that the government should be running SkyCatcher to view streams - but I bet they didn't include opensource options into their video viewer solution that would have saved $$$ in upfront and ongoing maintenance costs.

jmatt 17y ago

Wow, It's amazing they couldn't fix this over the last decade. Even a simple obfuscation, anything is better than raw data that is so easily viewable and worse verifiable. I would assume there is plenty of people with experience encrypting and decrypting radio / satellite signals for the military in the US. Maybe the problem lies in it not being a software problem, but rather some horrid design that relegates it to hardware. Either way now that this is public knowledge it needs to be fixed appropriately.