That's an article about a mobile Russian radar unit. This drone appears to be a stealth drone, so it's less likely that radar would have been the key to downing it.
Cyber attacks, stealth-penetrating radar, etc. seem unlikely.
Until there are real facts, maybe Occam's razor is the best course. The simpler explanation is that the drone just malfunctioned.
I doubt they would disclose how exactly they did it, but Iran receiving an electronic warfare equipment not 6 weeks ago and then this drone miraculously falling into their hands undamaged - it is reasonable to assume there is correlation. Or perhaps they shot it down, made a replica and tried convincing the US that they could land their drones at will. However, I think it is highly unlikely that the drone just "malfunctioned", and in a way that allowed it to be captured in perfect condition.
You might want to look up an incident in Serbia where the stealth jet was in fact downed that way (a bit more complicated that just a radar, but it was still tracked along the sky from the ground through electronic means).
Zoltan [the Serbian battery commander, whose missiles downed an American F-16, and, most impressively, an F-117] used the human spotters and brief use of radar, with short range shots at American bombers. The SA-3 was guided from the ground, so you had to use surprise to get an accurate shot in before the target used jamming and evasive maneuvers to make the missile miss. The F-117 he shot down was only 13 kilometers away.
Zoltan got some help from his enemies. The NATO commanders often sent their bombers in along the same routes, and didn't make a big effort to find out if hotshots like Zoltan were down there, and do something about it. Never underestimate your enemy.
"Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground."
"BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim."
If this is true, how on earth did they manage to take control of the plane ? Surely a top secret drone would have significant defenses against precisely this kind of attack.
They created enough interference/distortion to make the drone go into automatic landing mode? I don't know how they work so I don't even know if they if have that mode, but that's what I would guess.
Knowing how unreliable RF can be, I think they had to make a tradeoff between self-destruct on interference being a hilarious and cheap way to destroy their expensive drone fleet and landing on extended interference.
Self-destruct on interference ... of a stealth drone... in enemy airspace... because it is presumably damaged to the point where it can't fly east.
It's stealth, so they shouldn't have been able to track it. It's encountering this over enemy airspace, so it should interpret this as an attack. The untethered drone has a few options: (a) fly east, (b) self-destruct, or (c) land.
It's bizarre that it chose to land under those conditions.
"top secret" is just another way to say "security hasn't been properly reviewed and pen-tested".
Of course there are defenses against this sort of thing. Are they effective and comprehensive? Unless the system has been under months of public scrutiny, that's unlikely.
Since most people are going with Iran's side of the story being correct, I'll be the counter voice. It is far more likely that the plane did malfunction and it landed on its own and Iran picked it up. I'm not saying it is impossible for them to hack the communications channel, but is extremely unlikely. Pretend for a second that the military was using something even marginally dumb (which they aren't), the minimum requirement for Iran to take control would be:
* Intercept the control signal
* Decrypt it somehow (in a short period of time)
* Jam (from the ground) the US signal going to the plane, while not jamming themselves (equally unlikely)
* Give the proper C&C commands to the plane to land
Or the more likely scenario of the plane malfunctioned (it is a test plane being used in production) and landed itself.
My biggest concern would be if the self-destructs onboard fired as they were supposed to.
Or perhaps they lured it to a known location, spotted it in the daytime with binoculars, intercepted it with an old-fashioned human pilot in a jet, who blasted it with turbulent jet exhaust until it went into an unrecoverable stall. Sure it's probably a long shot, but we don't know how many times they may have tried and it didn't work either.
Agreed, it's a simple application of Occam's razor.
The only possible scenario I see where they actually managed to take control of it is if they have good inside information. That's not impossible, of course, but then they wouldn't give it away like that.
China was able to gain full access to an American satellite (or at least blamed for it [http://informationweek.com/news/government/security/23190190... ]). I would bet that Russia has similar capabilities. Iran isn't working in isolation, and if either Russia or China decided to crack their knuckles in this situation, the likelihood of the craft being downed is higher than one might initially think.
If you can jam the control signal long enough, does the plane go into some kind of failsafe mode where it tries to land? What happens if it runs out of fuel?
I'd say the most likely scenario is this: low-level engineer discovers the frequency the drone is on, jams it, it lands itself, then the (pleasantly surprised) engineer claims to his superior that he intercepted it and commanded it to land.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, there are many worries about exactly this, compromise of components used in the US military, when imported from foreign countries.
I think you're potentially overestimating how competently the military protects these drones. Video from drones over Iraq were intercepted by insurgents using a $26 piece of software:
considering Iran's hacking of Diginotar certificate as a precedent, i don't think it is unimaginable.
Similar possibility without actual hacking of C&C channel encryption is that the drone (or its windows command machines in Nevada) is just plain infected with a drone virus (like it was recently reported) which has a code "if (it is a steath drone flying over Iran) then (land)"
Sigh, again, modern news gone bad. Computers in the same base and area as the control computers had a virus, but it could not affect the software used to control the planes.
>Sigh, again, modern news gone bad. Computers in the same base and area as the control computers had a virus, but it could not affect the software used to control the planes.
so, operator behind windows machine can issue a command to the drone using keyboard/joystick/mouse attached to that machine, yet virus residing in the same machine can't? How come? Does the drone recognize received commands as issued by virus vs. issued by operator ? By smell or a smily at the end or the word "Please" at the start of the command :)
Oh, I agree completely that it's possible. I was just disagreeing with the assertion that getting an unencrypted video feed implies that it might be easy.
I can imagine a number of potential scenarios for bringing down an aircraft like this, ranging from full control takeover to interruption of communication until fuel exhaustion and partial crash.
Or perhaps we've bugged it and let them have it. Think we might want to know where they'd take something like this?
Having worked on drones, I'm not speaking out of turn on them. I didn't work on this particular program (in that case I wouldn't have posted b/c that would be most likely illegal), but similar programs.
How are you going to fake the GPS map? It sounds pretty hard to do. Is there an actual attack?
I guess you could do it if you had actual atomic clocks sending precisely-calibrated signals made to look like the satellites were wherever you wanted them to be. Still, I guess it would be pretty hard to jam the actual satellites, since you'll also be jamming your own signal.
Well, if you ever tried to use a more powerful RF transmitter than your neighbor, you can overwhelm her signal, no need to "jam" with noise or mine for that matter.
I should have used a different word than jamming for the GPS map distortion, since it might imply that I was referring to sending random gibberish, so wikipedia to the rescue:
Now, knowing that DGPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DGPS) is pretty common, I don't see where's the difficulty on sending a fake signal in the GHz range, more powerful than the weak one coming from the km high satellites.
Considering that some(most?) drones send their return video in the clear, I wouldn't be surprised if the GPS systems end up being not properly engineered to handle this scenario.
Jamming the GPS signal is much different than spoofing 3+ GPS satellites. You can buy a 5 watt Russian GPS jammer for fairly cheap, but spoofing GPS, getting it all right is not available on anything publicly for sale. Pretend Iran could get that math right at the same time as jamming the plane (from above btw!!) to block the real GPS satellites. I'm sure one of the many http://lmgtfy.com/?q=gps+anti-jam defense contractors would happily sell the military something that might resolve that issue.
I've got nothing to say about the encryption - that seems impossible to deal with.
You can (apparently) get a developer kit for STANAG 4586 for the low low price of € 9 900.00. Not like the diy drone stuff, this is a kit based on the NATO spec for participating on a UAV's control network. This is like 5 minutes and google. an organization with the resources of a nation behind it could probably get farther.
Be sure you're not just discounting Iranian competence due to your own nationalistic pride. Its quite feasible that this drone was taken over - after all, drones in that area have been being hacked into for years. For YEARS.
And, the US military is not as smart as you think. You can buy cheap off the shelf equipment to access drone networks ..
I don't believe this a drone, this is a drone mockup or its a drone we've not seen before.
First off the colors are wrong, the coating on an RQ170 is black/grey its not painted because painting it changes its radar reflection signature.
Second we don't see the bottom of the drone, if we did there would be either landing gear (if they managed to get it to actually land, or a scraped up bottom) According to Lockheed the drone lands when it runs out of gas and it does so with the landing gear retracted to avoid damage.
We don't see any armaments, where are the two hellfire missiles it keeps in its belly?
The shape of the motor nacelles is wrong. At least they aren't the same as every other photo of the RQ170.
Not sure what the game here is, but what this video shows is not an RQ170, of that I am certain.
Honestly, this whole episode sounds like the Americans allowed the super secret drone to fall into Iran's hands. Think about it, we're being told that there are no contingency plans to scuttle sensitive drone technology when it goes rogue? That this rogue drone landed itself in hostile territory when we know full well that it has GPS and probably a detailed map of no-fly zones? We scuttle everything that is abandoned: subs, stealth choppers. This capability was certainly not overlooked in these drones.
This is either a super fancy way of getting a new version of Stuxnet into Iranian research facilities, or a proxy play to deliver crippled/broken stealth technology to China.
The drones have a way to blow themselves up, and the US also knew where it crashed and considered bombing it in place. Because it was on Iranian soil the decision was made to not do this for diplomatic reasons.
It didn't crash, it landed. It decided to land, in Iran. It could have nosedived if the self-destruct system was non-responsive, but it landed instead. Valuable stealth technology just automatically landed in Iran, think about that. Iran, where multiple missile bases have just been randomly blowing up recently.
The US has the means to destroy it if they choose to - the Iranians can't stop a cruise missile or a stealth bomber. It was a political calculation NOT to destroy it.
The link you cite refers to first gen drones and then dives quickly into "probably" territory. It goes on to state the reason they don't bother with on-board self destruct anymore... if you had any working comms with which to trigger it, you'd just use that to regain control.
They absolutely have the means. Good friends of mine ran intercept and recovery operations in Afganistan and Iraq. Further I agree completely that it was a political calculation. The risk of flying a fighter (it would be near impossible to retask a bomber or cruise missle into the role) and a recovery team into Iran's borders was way higher than the risk of them recovering anything sensitive.
Difficult to detect a self destruct condition. Is losing all signals a condition? Then it's a simple matter of jamming all signals to force it to self destruct.
This could make an understanding of the drone's C&C structure by Iran much more of a feasible possibility. I have no idea if these really are connected but it was the first thing that came to mind reading about this story.
As an Iranian I can tell you the one thing the Iranian government loves the most is propaganda. Always bet on the side of incompetence rather than Iran being super secret spies. I can almost guarantee you that no Iranian believes anything about this that's coming from Iran's side, but you should not blindly trust either of what Iran or the US is saying about what happened.
This is just trying to catch people's attention and make Iran seem like a powerful country and a threat, and trust me the only people falling for it are the blind followers of mainstream news. No Iranian believes any of this.
My bet is that the US wants them to try to use the technology to either a.) get another Stuxnet into their computers while they download data from it, or b.) see them try to use it and ultimately embarrass themselves in the process.
There have been a lot of interesting views described so far, from hacking the control channel to the plane intentionally landing to put crippled technology into certain countrys' R&D pipelines.
My question is this: How do we even know that's a working drone? It would take a competent body and fender guy less than a week to fabricate and paint a 1:1 model of the exterior of one of these drones.
I've never worked on the RQ-170, but I have directly worked on other models, as well as other low observability aircraft. It has a command channel but was likely running autonomously.
To me, it looks like a rushed mockup designed from existing images for a press event:
- The wing seams are jacked up for a low observable airframe, though this could be because they disassembled it prior.
- The inlet grill configuration is an odd design for low observability and looks like it would significantly block airflow, but this is a low speed aircraft.
- The paint job is odd. Birds are always being repainted all kinds of crazy schemes, but I've never seen this kind. The body does look like it was crated with aircraft metal, though.
I'm willing to bet the original crashed and burned and that this is a mockup. Iran doesn't have the resources to land one of these intact, themselves. Neither does China or Russia.
>Iran doesn't have the resources to land one of these intact, themselves.
Pretty much the same believe was held about Soviet Union surface-to-air capabilities before the U2 incident (and the belief was true right to exactly the point of the accident as it did took 14 missiles to score the hit)
The interesting thing is that the video doesn't show anything which can't be found off the Internet or easily assumed.
I didn't say it was impossible, considering they likely have support from China and possibly Russia. It's just highly, highly unlikely in my opinion. And they're not going to just "jam" GPS and make it think an Iranian airport is it's home base. It doesn't work like that.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadCyber attacks, stealth-penetrating radar, etc. seem unlikely.
Until there are real facts, maybe Occam's razor is the best course. The simpler explanation is that the drone just malfunctioned.
In any case, http://www.google.ca/search?q=avtobaza+iran
> stealth-penetrating radar
You might want to look up an incident in Serbia where the stealth jet was in fact downed that way (a bit more complicated that just a radar, but it was still tracked along the sky from the ground through electronic means).
Zoltan [the Serbian battery commander, whose missiles downed an American F-16, and, most impressively, an F-117] used the human spotters and brief use of radar, with short range shots at American bombers. The SA-3 was guided from the ground, so you had to use surprise to get an accurate shot in before the target used jamming and evasive maneuvers to make the missile miss. The F-117 he shot down was only 13 kilometers away.
Zoltan got some help from his enemies. The NATO commanders often sent their bombers in along the same routes, and didn't make a big effort to find out if hotshots like Zoltan were down there, and do something about it. Never underestimate your enemy.
[1] - http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Main_Page
[2] - https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi
"BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim."
If this is true, how on earth did they manage to take control of the plane ? Surely a top secret drone would have significant defenses against precisely this kind of attack.
It's stealth, so they shouldn't have been able to track it. It's encountering this over enemy airspace, so it should interpret this as an attack. The untethered drone has a few options: (a) fly east, (b) self-destruct, or (c) land.
It's bizarre that it chose to land under those conditions.
Of course there are defenses against this sort of thing. Are they effective and comprehensive? Unless the system has been under months of public scrutiny, that's unlikely.
* Intercept the control signal
* Decrypt it somehow (in a short period of time)
* Jam (from the ground) the US signal going to the plane, while not jamming themselves (equally unlikely)
* Give the proper C&C commands to the plane to land
Or the more likely scenario of the plane malfunctioned (it is a test plane being used in production) and landed itself.
My biggest concern would be if the self-destructs onboard fired as they were supposed to.
The only possible scenario I see where they actually managed to take control of it is if they have good inside information. That's not impossible, of course, but then they wouldn't give it away like that.
* majority of technology in US is outsourced to China / India
* China is a good friend of Iran and India has a very close relationship
* some info about technology might be passed to Iran
And joke is: when they open the drone, they will see "made in China" sign somewhere.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2058849/Chinese-coun...
Also, it seems highly likely that most US secrets including drone control systems are likely to have been compromised by hackers.
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/chinese-hackers-took-...
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-04-21/us/pentagon.hacked_1_plan...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/world/middleeast/18drones....
Similar possibility without actual hacking of C&C channel encryption is that the drone (or its windows command machines in Nevada) is just plain infected with a drone virus (like it was recently reported) which has a code "if (it is a steath drone flying over Iran) then (land)"
so, operator behind windows machine can issue a command to the drone using keyboard/joystick/mouse attached to that machine, yet virus residing in the same machine can't? How come? Does the drone recognize received commands as issued by virus vs. issued by operator ? By smell or a smily at the end or the word "Please" at the start of the command :)
I can imagine a number of potential scenarios for bringing down an aircraft like this, ranging from full control takeover to interruption of communication until fuel exhaustion and partial crash.
Or perhaps we've bugged it and let them have it. Think we might want to know where they'd take something like this?
1. they jam the control signal and the drone goes into safe mode, tries to return to base.
2. Now, let's also jam the GPS signal with fake information to distort the earth's map so that it thinks that the base is somewhere inside Iran.
3. Show pretty pictures to the press with the intact drone.
I think I saw some movie about this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Dies
I guess you could do it if you had actual atomic clocks sending precisely-calibrated signals made to look like the satellites were wherever you wanted them to be. Still, I guess it would be pretty hard to jam the actual satellites, since you'll also be jamming your own signal.
I should have used a different word than jamming for the GPS map distortion, since it might imply that I was referring to sending random gibberish, so wikipedia to the rescue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaconing
Now, knowing that DGPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DGPS) is pretty common, I don't see where's the difficulty on sending a fake signal in the GHz range, more powerful than the weak one coming from the km high satellites.
Considering that some(most?) drones send their return video in the clear, I wouldn't be surprised if the GPS systems end up being not properly engineered to handle this scenario.
You can (apparently) get a developer kit for STANAG 4586 for the low low price of € 9 900.00. Not like the diy drone stuff, this is a kit based on the NATO spec for participating on a UAV's control network. This is like 5 minutes and google. an organization with the resources of a nation behind it could probably get farther.
And, the US military is not as smart as you think. You can buy cheap off the shelf equipment to access drone networks ..
First off the colors are wrong, the coating on an RQ170 is black/grey its not painted because painting it changes its radar reflection signature.
Second we don't see the bottom of the drone, if we did there would be either landing gear (if they managed to get it to actually land, or a scraped up bottom) According to Lockheed the drone lands when it runs out of gas and it does so with the landing gear retracted to avoid damage.
We don't see any armaments, where are the two hellfire missiles it keeps in its belly?
The shape of the motor nacelles is wrong. At least they aren't the same as every other photo of the RQ170.
Not sure what the game here is, but what this video shows is not an RQ170, of that I am certain.
This is either a super fancy way of getting a new version of Stuxnet into Iranian research facilities, or a proxy play to deliver crippled/broken stealth technology to China.
Something ain't right.
I highly suspect the drone was either operating inside Iran, or close enough to its borders that the US didn't want to risk sending an F-16 after it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
The US has the means to destroy it if they choose to - the Iranians can't stop a cruise missile or a stealth bomber. It was a political calculation NOT to destroy it.
They absolutely have the means. Good friends of mine ran intercept and recovery operations in Afganistan and Iraq. Further I agree completely that it was a political calculation. The risk of flying a fighter (it would be near impossible to retask a bomber or cruise missle into the role) and a recovery team into Iran's borders was way higher than the risk of them recovering anything sensitive.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-nuisance...
This could make an understanding of the drone's C&C structure by Iran much more of a feasible possibility. I have no idea if these really are connected but it was the first thing that came to mind reading about this story.
This is just trying to catch people's attention and make Iran seem like a powerful country and a threat, and trust me the only people falling for it are the blind followers of mainstream news. No Iranian believes any of this.
i hope the CIA didn't forgot to put the virus carrying USB stick into the weapons bay :)
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
My question is this: How do we even know that's a working drone? It would take a competent body and fender guy less than a week to fabricate and paint a 1:1 model of the exterior of one of these drones.
To me, it looks like a rushed mockup designed from existing images for a press event:
- The wing seams are jacked up for a low observable airframe, though this could be because they disassembled it prior.
- The inlet grill configuration is an odd design for low observability and looks like it would significantly block airflow, but this is a low speed aircraft.
- The paint job is odd. Birds are always being repainted all kinds of crazy schemes, but I've never seen this kind. The body does look like it was crated with aircraft metal, though.
I'm willing to bet the original crashed and burned and that this is a mockup. Iran doesn't have the resources to land one of these intact, themselves. Neither does China or Russia.
this is after falling from 20km height after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. Would be enough to produce a very closely resembling mockup :
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/u2/u2-wreckage....
>Iran doesn't have the resources to land one of these intact, themselves.
Pretty much the same believe was held about Soviet Union surface-to-air capabilities before the U2 incident (and the belief was true right to exactly the point of the accident as it did took 14 missiles to score the hit)
I didn't say it was impossible, considering they likely have support from China and possibly Russia. It's just highly, highly unlikely in my opinion. And they're not going to just "jam" GPS and make it think an Iranian airport is it's home base. It doesn't work like that.