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Depends entirely on why and how it was encrypted. If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must(edit,not necessarily) have the keys to

Depends entirely on why and how it was encrypted. If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must(edit,not necessarily) have the keys to boot clearly. If we are talking about recorded data, it's less clear. The imagery data may be encrypted to provide access control after the drives are removed from the plane and handed somewhere else. In which case, there's little reason the drone wouldn't have the decrypt keys. You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it. I'd suspect the way the military planed to handle that eventuality, however, would use on an exothermic random number generator (a.k.a. a self destruct mechanism/ explosive charge) rather than encryption. There's a lot of way more sensitive thing on the aircraft than just what it took pictures of that you need to destroy.

tsuraan 12y ago
> If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must have the keys to boot clearly My laptop doesn't have the keys to decrypt its own hard drive; it boots to initrd and waits for my smart card, which does the decryption. I would imagine the military can do better.
- anologwintermut 12y ago
  True. On the other hand, the military may need to be able to reboot the thing remotely/automatically, in which case it's possible they don't want to risk having to send the keys first.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    If I were to design such a system, booting to full functionality would require human intervention prior to launch, but would allow a reboot to a separate partition with enough functionality to fly the drone back to base. Data, as was pointed before, would be asymmetrically encrypted and would require a separate key that would never reach the drone.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
derefr 12y ago
> If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must have the keys to boot clearly. Not necessarily. It could boot into a bootstrap state with a premaster secret, where it waits for a premaster-secret-encrypted drive-decryption key to be wired to it from its base-station before booting up. Kind of a very secure version of PXE.
alister 12y ago
> If we are talking about recorded data, ... You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it. In fact, there's a commercial (non-military) video recorder that does exactly that: https://deniablevideo.com/ https://deniablevideo.com/ It's basically on-the-fly encryption of continuous digital video (and, in this case, audio as well). It would work something like the following: A new random symmetric key would be generated every X minutes, and a snippet of incoming video would be encrypted with that key. Each of those random symmetric keys would be encrypted with public key encryption and saved so that the video can be recovered later by someone who has the private key. Given that a commercial product exists to do this, you would think that a military drone must obviously be doing it as well, right? Well, I'm not so sure since we learned that drones were not even encrypting the live video feed back to ground controllers as recently as 2009: "Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations." Full article is here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011

tsuraan 12y ago

> If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must have the keys to boot clearly My laptop doesn't have the keys to decrypt its own hard drive; it boots to initrd and waits for my smart card, which does the decryption. I would imagine the military can do better.

anologwintermut 12y ago
True. On the other hand, the military may need to be able to reboot the thing remotely/automatically, in which case it's possible they don't want to risk having to send the keys first.
- rbanffy 12y ago
  If I were to design such a system, booting to full functionality would require human intervention prior to launch, but would allow a reboot to a separate partition with enough functionality to fly the drone back to base. Data, as was pointed before, would be asymmetrically encrypted and would require a separate key that would never reach the drone.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

derefr 12y ago

> If we are talking about the flight control software, the airplane must have the keys to boot clearly. Not necessarily. It could boot into a bootstrap state with a premaster secret, where it waits for a premaster-secret-encrypted drive-decryption key to be wired to it from its base-station before booting up. Kind of a very secure version of PXE.

alister 12y ago

> If we are talking about recorded data, ... You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it. In fact, there's a commercial (non-military) video recorder that does exactly that: https://deniablevideo.com/ https://deniablevideo.com/ It's basically on-the-fly encryption of continuous digital video (and, in this case, audio as well). It would work something like the following: A new random symmetric key would be generated every X minutes, and a snippet of incoming video would be encrypted with that key. Each of those random symmetric keys would be encrypted with public key encryption and saved so that the video can be recovered later by someone who has the private key. Given that a commercial product exists to do this, you would think that a military drone must obviously be doing it as well, right? Well, I'm not so sure since we learned that drones were not even encrypting the live video feed back to ground controllers as recently as 2009: "Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations." Full article is here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011