9 ms·
Drug Traffickers Are Spoofing Border Drones
- elmar 11y agoThe use of General Atomics Predators on homeland security as been a complete Fiasco.
- imglorp 11y agoThere's plenty of aviation navigation methods aside from GPS, some of which will fit on a small processor. We've been doing optical/radar terrain map following for decades in cruise missiles for example. There's also inertial, celestial, VOR/NDB/TACAN, ADF and others. A smart navigator will use multiple methods; if one of its methods begins to disagree from the others, it can be downweighted.
- blacksmythe 11y ago>> inertial, ... A nice discussion of inertial navigation capability (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294): Consumer grade MEMS ...are not sufficient for intertial navigation, ... At around the $2K-30K you get systems that can provide accurate navigation for up to 2 minutes or so. Aviation grade IMUs ... maximum horizontal position drift of 1.5km in the first hour of operation. These will run 100K and up.
- moron4hire 11y agoOne uses inertial systems to cover for disruptions in service of the other systems.
- michaelt 11y agoThe ShadowHawk uses military-grade encryption and changes GPS frequencies every half second, according to Buscher. That doesn't sound true - the GPS satellites don't do frequency hopping, you get 1575.42MHz, 1227.60MHz and that's it. All the linked paper says is that you can use the precise time from a GPS receiver to start up a different radio system that needs precise timing.
- feld 11y agoI was wondering about this too... there's something fishy about this quote.
- morcheeba 11y agoI'll second that. It makes no sense. Perhaps they change a DGPS signal every half second, but that won't help. I've learned to not try to fix an absurd argument for the other person, so I'll stop speculating.
- moron4hire 11y agoLOL "Military Grade". Anything that is labeled "Military Grade" means it has gone through a long, bureaucratic specification and procurement process. The spec is obsolete by the time it actually gets anywhere. With the pace of progress these days, "Military Grade" means "5 years old."
- FLUX-YOU 11y agoI'm starting to think the same of healthcare software, except we call it "Hospital Grade"
- fweespeech 11y agoIt sounds like bullshit salespeak, tbh. "Hey we are doing what we can at the price point you asked for. If you want more, it costs more."
- upofadown 11y agoThe paper at the link isn't about any sort of countermeasures. It's about repeating GPS signals to the inside of shielded areas on the same frequencies.
- PaulAJ 11y agoTime to revive the old joke: Q: How do you smuggle a nuke into America? A: Hide it in a bale of mary jane.
- rwmj 11y ago"The bad guys" ... An unfortunate choice of words. Who are the bad guys in this situation? The drug traffickers? The militarized police force? The politicians supporting prohibition? Probably all of them.
- 67726e 11y agoDefinitely the guys who butcher people and leave them in 55 gallon drums. I'm hardly gonna blame the border patrol for doing their job which is guarding the border.
- mitchtbaum 11y ago“The fall of moral civilization has always been brought about by those who were "just doing their jobs".” ― Jeremy Grantham
- 67726e 11y agoCan someone please explain to me what is wrong with the CBP's job? The Nuremberg defense isn't valid, yeah, but what makes that situation apply to folks running defense on the border. Last time I checked we weren't gassing illegal immigrants.
- lbotos 11y agoIt's a stretch: > Smugglers want to get drugs to the lucrative American market. > Border Patrol are told to stop them cause drugs are bad. >Politicians enact more border patrol regulations to counteract our strict drug policy. I'm inferring that OP wants border patrol to be political activists and fight for better drug laws instead of just "doing their jobs".
- 67726e 11y agoI guess, but CBP does more than just deal with just the smuggling of drugs so it's hardly clear that's the point.
- draw_down 11y agoThis is silly.
- supergirl 11y ago"military-grade encryption" lol
- underbluewaters 11y agoIt would be pretty "funny" if all this military hardware coming home results in countermeasures being developed by drug traffickers that ends up back in Afghanistan. These guys probably have a freer hand and more funding to develop those sorts of tools.
- roymurdock 11y ago> UAVs helped in just 2 percent of apprehensions on the southwest border. The audit came out just as DHS was asking Congress to give it $443 million for another 14 Reapers, also called Predator Bs, which the agency received. So we spent $360m (at least, probably more due to creative accounting cited in article) on spoofable, hackable, drones since 2005. Then, instead of waiting for an audit, Congress greenlights another $443 to purchase 14 more of the same 2% value added drones which were designed to carry out strike missions in Afghanistan. Why?
- Wingman4l7 11y agoWhy do you think? Because that's what's on offer by the military contractors who have manufacturing plants in those senator's districts -- so that's what they buy. Or, if you prefer the faith-in-humanity answer: career politicians don't have an understanding of statistics.
- Wingman4l7 11y agoTo add to my other, now un-editable response: inertia may also play a role -- the existing procurement processes for the drones have already been worked out; it's probably a lot easier to make an additional order for the same product.
- jkot 11y ago> The bad guys on the border have lots of money and what they are putting money into is into spoofing and jamming GPS systems GPS jammer is under $50
- UnoriginalGuy 11y agoA unit that can jam my cellphone within a few feet is; jamming an aircraft at altitude is an entirely different class of device (if only for power output reasons).
- moron4hire 11y ago"Harden against attack". You mean "correct defects in design". The phrasing here implies that the state the drones are in is an acceptable one for most situations, just not this one. But it's an unacceptable state for any drones to be spoofable at all.
- sbierwagen 11y agoNote that Iran captured a RQ-170 drone back in 2011, possibly using GPS spoofing, so obviously using the encrypted military GPS signal isn't a perfect solution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... (How did they do it? Who knows. Maybe they jammed the encrypted channel, and spoofed the civilian channel, so when the drone fell back onto the unencrypted channel it was receiving bad navigation information)
- UnoriginalGuy 11y agoWhat strange is, if you read the article, an Iranian engineer claimed that it was GPS spoofing, but the US claims it's primary means of navigation is an inertial navigation system (which seems highly believable given up sketchy GPS can sometimes be). Plus the Iranians have a video of it smoothly landing at an Iranian airbase (which completely discredits the US's assertions that it crashed, and broke up).
- sbierwagen 11y agoIMUs are wildly expensive, and still have quite a lot of drift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294 Certainly the RQ-170 has an IMU, and I could believe it might use it as the primary means of navigation, but it's almost certainly corrected by GPS, which gives you a means of altering the drone's path by GPS spoofing.
- HiLo 11y agoI thought this was the one where they used that like $35 streaming software or whatever (I'm a finance guy, I know that probably sounds stupid) and were able to take over the controls, hence the landing?
- gozur88 11y agoThere's also a good chance that drone simply crashed without any help from the Iranians.