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The phones of Ukrainian president Zelensky
- jacquesm 5y agoWhen reading this keep in mind that Dudayev was killed when a call from his satellite phone was intercepted and allowed pinpointing of his location. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Assassination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Assassination
- naoqj 5y ago
- trhway 5y agoOne of the Russian generals was recently killed in Ukraine when he was located by Ukraine forces because he was supposedly using regular cell phone as Russian military communication equipment was broken. In general Ukraine seems to be doing a lot of cell tracking/intercepts for intelligence purposes there as Russian military personnel (whose cells were taken away before the invasion) robs the civilians of the phones and are using the phones for calls home as well as among themselves.
- baybal2 5y ago
- dboreham 5y agoIt's reasonable to assume that usg has very advanced capabilities in this field, possibly space-based. Also reasonable to wonder if those capabilities have been used recently.
- trhway 5y agoUkrainian TV has mentioned in the open that US helps Ukraine in particular by sharing various intelligence it collects over Ukraine.
- twaw 5y agoUSA shares their intelligence with significant delay. Moreover, language barrier (Russian to English, English to Ukrainian) doesn't help. An Ukrainian woman can report more and faster directly to Ukrainian army.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> USA shares their intelligence with significant delay Very few people can credibly speak to what the U.S. is sharing with whom on what timeframe. Perhaps nobody.
- jacquesm 5y agoNobody posting it on HN anyway, and those that do know realize how vitally important secrecy is.
- stef25 5y agoIt's probably safe to say a multitude of Western countries are passing all kinds of information to Ukraine through various back channels. As long as it's all plausibly deniable. With operations in the Middle East now basically "over" and a nuclear threat looming, I'd imagine it's all hands on deck for most Western intelligence agencies wrt to Russia. And rightly so.
- jansen555 5y ago[dead]
- amelius 5y agoWhat satellite network did he use, and did the Russians have access to the encryption keys?
- baybal2 5y agoIf you are the only person in the country with a satellite phone, finding you will not require any decryption, but an antiradiation missile.
- jacquesm 5y agoInmarsat and 'not that we know for sure', but that wasn't all that important because it did not matter what the contents of the call were (there was a Russian official on the other side of the call so they already knew everything that was said and could ID him) but where exactly it came from and for that the Russians had built a special purpose tracker that allowed them to pinpoint the location precisely enough that a jet sent quickly could make it to the location of the call and fire a missile. Since the Russians knew exactly when the call started they could presumably pick it out of the background and I highly doubt there were many such phones operating in the area to begin with. His big mistake was to be on the phone for just a little bit longer than it took for the plane to get there, on that day he spoke on the phone for 3 times as long as normal, 15 minutes as opposed to normally 5 or less.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> What satellite network did he use, and did the Russians have access to the encryption keys? Dudayev "was killed by a signal-guided missile" [1], an anti-radiation missile [2]. That doesn't require compromising the call's encryption any more than taking out a radar installation requires cracking its track algorithm. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120816090458/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/02/kill_the_messenger?page=0,1 https://web.archive.org/web/20120816090458/http://www.foreig... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile
- bob1029 5y agoThis is why militaries like to use DSSS communication technologies. It makes detection by these kinds of systems very difficult. The state of the art is offline processing of recorded "noise" on HPC server farms. In a "launch/guide missile" context, this is way too late, even if you find a coherent signal.
- dmix 5y agoThey knew the location of where he made calls previously as well, enough to booby trap it with an explosive: > The Russians did have the technology to track a satellite phone call but Dudayev never spoke long enough on the phone for a plane to get airborne and find him to launch an attack. > A Russian unit on the ground, however, did identify the gully as a place which Dudayev visited and planted a booby trap bomb there. > A combination of events leading up to Dudayev's death worked well in favour of the Russians. > When Dudayev made his fateful call from the gully, a plane was already airborne. > Once it was known that Dudayev was in the gully, the booby trap bomb was detonated and moments afterwards a rocket hit its target. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/325347.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/325347.stm
- jacquesm 5y agoYou may well be looking at an instance of 'parallel construction', at the time that article was written it was not yet known that the NSA had passed information regarding the sat phone to the Russians. I do believe that the plane was already airborne at the time the call was initiated because the Russians were on one side of that call and made a play for peace talks keeping him on the phone longer than would have happened otherwise.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Friday_ 5y ago> In November 2019, the young minister of the Cabinet of Ministers, Dmytro Dubilet, proposed... Thats a classic, you never read that "old and experienced" official propose smartphones. Maybe they know something that young doesn't.
- chockchocschoir 5y agoThat's an unusual take on the technical capabilities of the "old and experienced". I agree that it's generally hard to secure, but many "old and experienced" in governments are not against new technology because they understand it, but because they don't understand it. Watch any senate/congressional/government hearing about technology related subjects from your country's government and you'll see what I mean.
- ThalesX 5y agoI love technology as much as anyone, but at the end of the day we're humans, and experience in being a human comes with time. I think detracting from the wisdom of old men because they can't post memes on their smartphone is not the best thing we could do as a society.
- necheffa 5y agoExperience comes from doing, not time. Just because someone is old doesn't mean they are experienced. It just means there is a greater chance they are experienced.
- KineticLensman 5y agoAlso, 'science advances one funeral at a time'
- ThalesX 5y agoThat chance also increases with them being in politics. That chance also increases when they are part of a committee. That chance also increases when the ‘adversaries’ are tech-moguls trying to push for their version of utopia. Ultimately, I’m not sure we can realistically accuse most political dinosaurs of just passing time for a couple of decades.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- IgorPartola 5y agoOne tidbit I found in this that I never heard of before is the Kalyna encryption algorithm. This is apparently a Ukrainian block cipher that became the national standard in 2015: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalyna_(cipher) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalyna_(cipher)
- jacquesm 5y agoDoes 'Don't roll your own crypto' hold at the level of nation states the size of Ukraine?
- IgorPartola 5y agoI was hoping someone with more knowledge of this cipher would weigh in and answer that.
- kingcharles 5y agoAt least they said they would double-encrypt with AES on top, so that might save them from many bad actors.
- ecf 5y agoMeanwhile… https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/21/trump-phone-security-risk-hackers-601903 https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/21/trump-phone-securi...