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Israeli Drone Feeds Hacked by British and American Intelligence
- freddealmeida 11y agoburn.
- blennon 11y agoCan someone explain the rationale for leaking this? I have been a strong critic of NSA domestic surveillance, but what is described in the article seems to be the appropriate use of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
- dflock 11y agoI don't know their motivation, but if I wanted to effect real change to the surveillance state in the USA, I would want the Israeli political lobby on my side in Washington.
- tptacek 11y agoIsrael doesn't give a shit; they've owned up all sorts of US infrastructure, and even (famously) had double agents planted in the US.
- kasey_junk 11y agoAnd actively lobby for their early release from prison.
- ryanlol 11y agoThat's kind of expected.
- wavefunction 11y agoBut not appreciated.
- ryanlol 11y agoBy whom? Not lobbying for the release of your own spies would be very much out of the ordinary.
- kasey_junk 11y agoMy point was that even though they are allies there are normal & public interactions around spying. So yes, very much expected. The unexpected thing is people assuming allies don't spy on each other.
- dflock 11y agoAnd if they could hamper the CIA/NSA, even a little bit, they wouldn't bother?
- azernik 11y agoI feel like this quote from Yuval Steinitz just has to be a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of that. Or it's just the most bald-faced lie I've heard in ages - not sure which interpretation is more funny. “We know that the Americans spy on the whole world, and also on us, also on their friends. But still, it is disappointing, inter alia because, going back decades already, we have not spied nor collected intelligence nor hacked encryptions in the United States.”
- wavefunction 11y agoWell, I met a probable Israeli spy in-artfully posing as an art-student in Colorado when I was 19 working at an ISP that had purchased some wireless tech from an Israeli firm. I suspect it is fully-in-cheek.
- dsq 11y agoHow did you know he was a spy? Did he act sneaky?
- idoco 11y agoFollow the money. Israeli sources claim that the reason that this information is published at this timing is a German-Israeli drone deal in which the US Predator lost - http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/international/europe/2016/01/13/bundeswehr-germany-lease-israeli-drones/78723784/ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/international/europ... They also claim that since 2011 (The last "hacking" incident) there was a major change in the way that drone communication is encrypted. Edit: changed 2010 to 2011
- runjake 11y agoThe article pretty clearly details interceptions as recent as 2012. And maybe it still goes on, we don't know, because this apparently came from the 2013 Snowden leak.
- idoco 11y agoThese are not my claims, they are taken from Israeli sources. They probably have there own interests too. The only event I found from 2012 is labeled as 'regular collects of Heron TP carrying weapons' I'm not sure what it means.
- dogma1138 11y agoCould mean anything from them being able to intercept video from the tail cam to them just tracking the drones based on signal / radar information. All the imagery from the Israeli drones is from circa 2009-2010.
- bendykstra 11y agoThe US drone fleet was not more secure at that time. In 2008, recordings of drone feeds were discovered on the laptops of Shi’ite militants. Four years later, less than half the drone fleet had been upgraded to use encrypted video. http://www.wired.com/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/ http://www.wired.com/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/
- ronreiter 11y agoIf spying on allies sounds appropriate to you, then I'm not sure you understand why Snowden is even an issue.
- tptacek 11y agoAll allies spy on each other. A lot. Germany's biggest espionage issue isn't Russia; it's France.
- privong 11y ago> If spying on allies sounds appropriate to you, then I'm not sure you understand why Snowden is even an issue. I disagree. The important revelations from Snowden (in my opinion) is not nation-states spying on (officals of) other nation-states, it's nation-states conducting dragnet surveillance on their own citizens and citizens of other countries.
- 13thLetter 11y agoTrue, but there was a big to-do about US spying on German officials a little while back. If it was that horrible and offensive for us to spy on the German government, it's also just as horrible and offensive for us to spy on the Israeli government. (My personal view is that the US should definitely spy on every government in the world, and they're welcome to try to spy on us if they want, because it's dumb to pretend that it's not going to happen and then pitch a fit when what everyone knew was happening is revealed to be happening. But under that policy it's not better or worse to target Germany as opposed to Israel.)
- meepmorp 11y agoThere's a political agenda at work here, which views all intelligence activities as being morally equivalent, and thus this is as wrong as warrantless domestic surveillance.
- krapp 11y agoI believe the rationale is that there are still Snowden documents to leak, so they will be leaked until they no longer generate revenue. The public interest ceased to be an issue as soon as the documents were handed off to the media.
- caskance 11y agoRemittite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
- tptacek 11y agoIt looks like these came from the Snowden documents. Am I reading that wrong?
- azernik 11y agoSeems so.
- diyorgasms 11y agoThat's what I gathered from the article too. It seems strange that there's an awful lot of pro-Israel handwaving in this thread implying that The Intercept (of all outlets) would publish this piece at the behest of the US government.
- petra 11y agoAny idea how it was technically achieved?
- kelvin0 11y agoWireShark: Allied Drone Edition. No seriously, I have no clue.
- paulmd 11y agoThe Israelis used a commercially-available encryption scheme, VideoCrypt, which was brute-forced (albeit slowly) as early as 1994. Then it's just a matter of intercepting the satellite signal from somewhere within its downlink footprint. The article dates to 2010 and it sounded like the Israelis were switching to a better encryption scheme even back then, so I'd expect this information is strategically useless now. VideoCrypt was probably more of a "fences make good neighbors" thing to keep Hezbollah from seeing their drone feeds quite so easily. Also on the "dates to 2010" thing, this is probably something that could be GPU-accelerated nowadays.
- petra 11y agoThanks. So why would the Israeli Army use, in 2009-2010 , something that was brute-forced in 1994 ?
- paulmd 11y agoBecause it's available off the shelf, is compatible with your gear, and raises the bar past "schmuck with C-band satellite dish".
- dogma1138 11y agoEveryone does, drones for the most part still use analogue video because latency matters and it also simplifies quite allot of things. Encryption in military application has to take a second stance to availability this is why many tactical systems use obfuscation and signal intercept avoidance (e.g. spread spectrum frequency hopping which is highly effective especially when combined with differential signaling) rather than proper encryption since key exchange and management is still a big issue in real world applications. Having strong encryption that will fail you when you need it and make you system unavailable is a much bigger risk in tactical military applications than some one intercepting and decrypting your communications (note tactical application, for strategic communications the playbook is completely different). Military communication gear (and pretty much every other piece of electronics) is also quite out dated due to the sheer time scales involving adoption and it having to support integration with legacy systems that might be 30 years behind it. With drones specifically bandwidth is also an issue especially if you aren't say the US and can launch nearly 20 dedicated satellites to support your drone fleet (and even US drones have the same issues, their communications were scrambled at all until 2009 and some probably still aren't). Drones have limited bandwidth what you usually do is use encrypted digital signaling for the command and control channels and multiplex all of your sensors over analogue video which is then usually transmitted using standard TV broadcasting protocols (either terrestrial or satellite), if you can scramble your sensory signals sufficiently to prevent real time capture more power to you but it's not the main goal - making sure the signal gets back to you, that you do not lose imagery due to bandwidth limitations and that there is as little delay as possible is the key part, having a signal which can also be easily decoded is also important because if you cant propagate it to the forces that need to consume the feeds from the drone (and these aren't rear echelon guys those ones can wait, were talking on boots in the ground or in the cockpit) it cant serve its main mission.
- dogma1138 11y agoOne of the downsides of encrypting analog video you don't have to have the correct key to decrypt it just something good enough to get you in the ball park, the video quality will suffer greatly but you'll end up with more or less an image you can view (this also quite commonly affects steganography with poor keys you can brute force it in seconds you won't get a good image but if it's text it will be immediately readable).
- tptacek 11y agoCan you go into more detail about this "analog encryption" you're talking about? You might be talking about some kind of Spectravision-style video scrambling, but that's not really "encryption" in the modern sense --- in the modern sense, encryption, with an actual cipher, must necessarily take digital inputs.
- dogma1138 11y agoIt is still encryption it's like calling a caesar cipher not encryption. It still uses a key and some sort of an encryption algorithm the problem with all of these encryption (or call it scrambling algorithms) is that the persevere the integrity of the video frame so basically you are still getting a video frame which can be broadcast and received as any standard video signal while only the image it self will be "encrypted/scrambled". Because of this there are several brute force methods that can reconstruct the image without having to even know which algorithm was actually used in the encryption because the elements are always the as the video frame maintains the scan lines and even if you use pixels it's not that big of a deal. Live sensory image from drones is still fairly low res usually in the 400-600 scan lines range (interlaced video is still quite often used because then for example you can multiplex 2 sensory images e.g. FLIR/SWIR and normal visible elctrooptical sensor into a single channel and switch between them without any delay or without any sync issues). Because every frame is scrambled on it's own and is still a valid frame we know 3 things 1) all of the data to reconstruct the image is present within the frame 2) all of the data to reconstruct the image is still in the same basic format as the encrypted frame is still a valid video frame 3) we know exactly how many possible combinations there can be based on the resolution of the image. Combine that knowledge with a basic brute force algorithms without knowing anything about how the encryption actually works you usually tie it with something like Fast Fourier transform to detect edges in the frequency domain (because in our case high frequency = edge) because once you get enough of them you know that you actually have a valid image. This results in a relatively very fast algorithm that can produce images (even if not perfect) from any raw scrambled/encrypted video.
- tyre 11y agoThis is a great use of the NSA/GCHQ. From a global security perspective, we absolutely want to know if Israel is about to bomb Iran. If we can't trust their word (and Netanyahu's public statements are rather bellicose) then this doesn't feel like a bad thing. Also different from other leaks, the targets here were other militaries. This type of leaking gives credence to the national security concerns — what's the public need to know here? Really just a "how the sausage is made" look into military intelligence, interesting because we're curious moreso than because the government is acting unethically.
- ForHackernews 11y agoAgreed. This is exactly what the NSA should be doing. This leak has no value to the public.
- revelation 11y agoI'm sure the Israelis care that their fighter jets and drones use crypto that can be trivially broken with current computing power? It also of course plays into the whole fix vs exploit debate. Should the NSA inform on weak crypto or subvert it for their own purposes? What if its crypto used by a military partner? Where lies the greater public value?
- tptacek 11y agoThe IDF absolutely knows that their old drone video feeds were insecure. They didn't need The Intercept to tell them that. As for your second question, there is no actual debate about whether NSA should hoard/exploit or "fix" vulnerabilities in foreign signals intelligence. Their charter is to exploit. That's what SIGINT is. The debate is whether NSA should be required to fix vulnerable infrastructure when that infrastructure is used by US commercial infrastructure. That's not what's happening here.
- revelation 11y agoSo since they knew, there is no harm? Your second point seems to miss that whatever the foreigners are using may be a popular choice for naturals as well. (Notice the US selling F-16 abroad only to then having to break their video stream. At least the British don't sell missiles that they can't deactivate when coming their way)
- davidf18 11y agoA related story about Cybersecurity in Israel. Israel's Cybersecurity industry ranks second in the world after the US. http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-israel-became-the-go-to-place-for-cyber-security/ http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-israel-became-the-go-to-pla...
- bazillion 11y agoI tried to do an AMA yesterday[1] about my time in the NSA and the CIA that fell flat as far as generating any interest. My main goal was to bring some reality to the security conversation, since the government's voice mostly remains absent and I have a pro-government lean on the security issue. I was a mission manager for the LENA (Levant/North Africa) division for the NSA, so I'm speaking from a very informed opinion on this particular release. As you can expect, my opinion on information like this being released is: Why? How can this be considered journalism. Militaries keeping track of militaries is exactly what we want happening with taxpayer dollars. From a purely defense perspective, this is a good use of resources as others in this comment section have mentioned. But, releasing documents that actually detail sources/methods of collection are purely harmful -- I see absolutely nothing that can be misconstrued as noble by publishing an article like this. There is another half to this. These documents that are being released have to stop being cited as if they're the canonical truth. Snowden did the equivalent of scraping a bunch of google pages pulling all documents down willy-nilly, and there are tons of absolute crap documents in there. You can tell that some of these powerpoints were made by E-3's giving briefs to some equally clueless group from the quality of the presentations themselves. I'm definitely thankful for the people that came out and asked questions, as I tried to give extremely straight-forward, un-political answers. If you have any questions, feel free to reply to the reddit thread and I'll still answer them, so at least there can be a record of it. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4346rc/im_justin_mealey_a_former_arabic_linguist_at_nsa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4346rc/im_justin_meal... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10989800
- jonnybgood 11y ago> You can tell that some of these powerpoints were made by E-3's giving briefs to some equally clueless group from the quality of the presentations themselves. Indeed. Many are viewing these presentations as if they're official documents like an SOP and what not. The presentations are under the discretion of the creator which can be anybody and say anything. But because it has 'Top Secret' on it many will treat it, as you say, canonical truth. I stopped trying to explain this on the internet. I only explain it personally now.
- eliteraspberrie 11y agoThank goodness. Knowing NSA spies on Iranian drones, my civil liberties have been restored.
- zurn 11y agoThe article says Israel only added crypto after Hezbollah used the unencrypted feeds against them on the ground in real time, it sounds like their threat model is not necessarily about NSA intercepting and eventually crackig the encrypted feeds.
- CrowFly 11y agoFigures Hacker News would want to spread false propaganda against Israel.