Informative article overall but it also includes this:
"Iran will take care to hide the drone well as the U.S. would likely try to destroy it if its location would be known. When the Chinese collected parts of a stealth F-117 stealth plane that was downed in Yugoslavia the U.S. bombed their embassy in Belgrade."
The second claim about the Chinese is ridiculous. But apart from that, assuming they have the drone intact, what will the Iranians actually learn from it? If I give you a PC motherboard, you can learn from it but to produce one is another thing altogether. Same for developing anti-drone electronic warfare technology. Most likely the drone information will be passed to the Russians, who may have had this idea all along.
I think this is probably the most plausible explanation. Apparently six weeks ago the Iranians took delivery of the Russian's latest Avtobaza ground-based electronic intelligence and jamming system.
If that's the case it's a win win for both Iran and Russia. Iranians get the press coup of poking the US's eye whilst Russia walks away with an RQ-170 (to reverse engineer and resell to the Iranians of course).
there's a test bed to see if your new stealth-detecting radar works as advertised...you can do tests on the composition of the RAM in the skin...you can test your viruses and EW software/hardware on its controls
It is my understanding of hacking that some people see compiled binaries as source code. Likewise, some really hardcore hardware hackers can manage to decrypt and reverse engineer a lot of stuff from chips. This include but might not be limited to : hardware encryption keys, communication protocols and specifics about sensors, which might help them to evade them in the future
I think that makes it more likely it had a soft landing. Loses propulsion systems and the computer continues to keep the craft level and in control as long as possible which means gliding right up to the point the collision detection pulls up for a nice gentle belly landing.
edit: And to continue the baseless speculation, I think the drone has a transponder on a timer that is set to go off in 72 hours. Some hidden Iranian installation is going to light up like Las Vegas.
"Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code."
That was an interesting speculative leap. And about where my suspension of derision broke, reading the article. The US military gets a lot of things wrong with their gadgets, but comsec is not usually one of them.
Which was strictly the video feed from the first generation predator drones. If you look into the linked USAF docs, you'll see the actual telemetry and control channels are encrypted.
Wired is about as reliable about security reporting as Fox News is about the DNC. They know their audience, and want to sell eyeballs.
I am not sure how exactly I would do it, but my first approach would probably be almost purely mechanic.
Lets assume the drone is more or less blind to whatever happens above it as most of its sensors are pointed down and being stealth reduces its need to be aware of other planes (and forbids active radar). It should be feasible to approach it without being noticed and somehow entangling it (a net?) on its return flight, slowing it down (a parachute) until it runs out of fuel, and do it while jamming its communications so its owners won't have a clue of what's going on.
I think the worst problem is detecting it in the first place.
I'd expect it to be easier with a jet engine than propellers? Just use a steel cable net. Speaking of which, maybe if you use a close-mesh metallic net (maybe in addition to a coarse one for trapping), you'd break its uplink without any need for active electronic warfare?
All you'd have to do is to damage the propeller. A jet engine would probably run until there is no more fuel. I don't know how they did it, but, with the right incentive, any reasonably clever engineer would manage to do it.
It's a very unfortunate mistake to underestimate your opponents enough to give them your secret stealth drone.
The WP is a much more responsible and accurate article than Wired's sensational summary -- the salient points there are "Video is unencrypted", "Pentagon has tolerated this for years" and "Predator."
Getting back to the actual focus of my comment -- the original article leaps to "obviously, the Iranians have broken our encrypted controls" from an Iranian press release, without bothering to give even speculative support. I consider it far more plausible that something simpler has happened, such as dumb old software failure, or GPS spoofing.
It appears that one or both wings might have been reconnected with tape. In short, there appears to be substantially more damage to the airframe than was otherwise suggested.
My only question is why did the drone not self destruct when it noticed it was going to land on enemy territory?
if I were designing these things I would make sure to include a package with enough destructive power to reduce the drone to very small pieces under those circumstances. They could fool GPS, but they shouldn't be able to fool inertial and visual guidance. Landing in one piece on enemy soil is unthinkable.
It would be silly to define "enemy territory" as "anything non-US". You seem to assume the drone had no way to notice the fact it was landing on Iranian soil when, in fact, I am quite sure it could pinpoint its location on a map with remarkable precision.
Just FYI, drones don't fly from America to attack Middle Eastern countries. They have nearby bases to land the planes, while the actual control is in America. Or so the media says. But I don't see how you can fly such a small plane with a military payload across the Pacific Ocean, twice, without refueling
It's possible that including anything destructive that could be interpreted as a weapon would be a major diplomatic liability. However, along these lines, I know that these drones are designed to fly back to home base if they lose contact. That suggests that the Iranians, if they really were responsible for downing it, managed a more advanced electronic attack than merely jamming the signal.
That said, you're right that it's probably a more reliable failsafe to attach some explosives and a GPS device, separate from all the rest of the electronics, as a way of depriving the enemy of the UAV than to rely on it to make it's way back home.
You don't have to put enough explosives to qualify it as a flying bomb. All you need is explosives on critical parts (electronics, structural elements, engines, fuel tanks) that make enough damage as to make the debris useless. Break the wings, make engine parts fly through the fuselage and destroy the electronics. If you do it 20 thousand feet above the ground, your friends will have a lot of fun assembling your puzzle.
Alternatively, wait until the thing is wheeled out in front of a bunch of military dignatories. Didn't a missile demo wipe out a grandstand of military onlookers recently?
Or at least wipe itself so software and encryption can be removed. You would think they would have a "Find my iDrone" function with remote wipe for such an expensive piece of equipment.
I'll go out a limb here. It seems like it was too easy and too valuable. Smells like a Trojan Horse. Who knows what Iran will be getting themselves into when they move the thing to some "secure" location. Oh, I do likes a good conspiracy...
As interesting as that possibility might sound, I am reminded of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
A drone with improper (or beaten) failsafes and countermeasures seems far more likely than a planted trojan.
And if modern history -- especially 21st century modern history -- is any guide, we can bet on two things: 1) The US's overestimation of its own technological advantages; 2) The US's underestimation of its enemies' technological capabilities.
I can't find a link at the moment, but the CIA grossly overestimated Russia's long-range bomber fleet from what it saw during a military parade - it turns out the Soviets had the same aircraft fly the parade route in a continuous loop.
Perhaps the real problem is our Military will often overestimate what technology is capable of, and is blind to some of its downsides.
We've massively underestimated China on a consistent basis -- and, while it's true that they are probably running similar Potemkin-village-style games as the Russians played in the Cold War, some of their technological leaps are well established. Especially in the domains of cyber warfare, ballistics, and supercomputing.
We've underestimated Iran, Hezbollah, insurgent forces, etc., pretty routinely -- in terms of their technological capabilities, adaptability, and organizational sophistication.
I do agree with you, though, that we tend to overestimate what technology is capable of. I'd expand that point, however, and say that we overestimate what big, expensive hardware is capable of. And we underestimate low-tech, low-cost, jury-rigged, creative uses of technology.
Additionally, we tend to underestimate the diffusion -- be it through theft, connectivity, sale, espionage, or what have you -- of cutting edge technological know-how in today's world.
This article might be worth reading if it included even a single shred of evidence to back up the author's ridiculous assumptions. Instead, what we got is "this must be what happened because it's the best thing a completely uninformed layman like myself can come up with."
The truth is that an Iranian cowboy caught it with a lasso, in case any of you were wondering.
Edit: Undeniable proof of this article's absurdity: "Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code."
Because all you do is take a few encrypted flight control readings, put them into Code Breaker 2.0, then enjoy your brand new (previously owned) stealth drone, right?
Well obviously the author is just speculating on how it could have been done.
My point is that it's not totally out of the question that Iran took hold of this drone via the LoS landing controls, if those landing controls are vulnerable to replay attack.
This whole post is just speculation. It happens to be interesting, which is cool, but I don't think anybody is making the claim that this author knows exactly what happened.
Peace? America hasn't been in peace for over a decade.
If you mean peace, specifically with Iran, I think that's a stretch. America is actively trying to take down Iran's government, flying spy planes in its air space and sending in viruses that damage its equipment. Meanwhile, Iran is funding terrorist organizations who target the West and trying to build a nuclear bomb. This is not peace.
Why is it foolish? Perhaps their goal is prevent a conflict with US. The calculus being that, once there is a conflict they will take undue damage. So better prevent any conflict by sending a message that we are not defenseless.
Just think about it, there is so much news about this now, that any attack from US will face some internal opposition.
For all we know the plane was downed by the administration, to reduce the pressure from GOP's posturing of attack on Iran.
I only kept reading after that line to see if there were additional conjectures involving "reversing polarity" and/or "reconfiguring the shields through the sensor array."
I usually don't make this kind of comments but, after reading the linked article and its comments (on the linked page) I was wondering if everybody suddenly reached absolute stupidity.
Glad to see that we can still discuss rationally here at HN.
As rkon said, not worth reading. It is that stupid. Read only if you have some kind of fascination for human stupidity.
Why is it hard to believe they decrypted the pattern recognition? Iran topped the World's most scientific nation, surpassing the US and China in the amount of scientific publications published; From the NewScientist Magazine: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20291-iran-is-top-of-t...
I'm in noway supportive of the Islamic regime, (or any other regime) but most of the comments here seem to be rooted in an underestimation of Iranian (Ar'yan) antiquity.
What do you expect from a US forum?
Anyway, FEMA is activating the camps, hiring staff. And the 'military can arrest and hold anyone indefinitely in the US' act is about to become law.
So they'll all get what they deserve. Will be interesting to see how long the denial holds out.
That would make a lot of sense.. To design a secret spy drone so that it lands on the ground and have anyone inspect it, take it and sell it, when it 'runs out of fuel' haha.
It really does make me wonder. We feel we have the right to do anything to any other country, yet if it was being done to us it would be the worst thing ever. Can you imagine if Pakistan was flying predator drones over US cities and fighting 'terrorism' as they saw it, accidentally killing US citizens sometimes? And then claim that it isn't a war-like activity?
I don't know if you're being ironic or not, but I do find tat substantially plausible. Sounds more plausible than all the hi-tech everybody is suggesting iran has.
I understand that most of the people in here are from California, NY or some advanced european country. Being a citizen of a not so developed european country, I would remind you that not every country has high tech at its disposal.
Iran is a rather undeveloped country and it is governed by a rather radical form of islam, resourcing to all sorts of primitive oppression and practices which is everything but inovation friendly. Sure it puts a lot of money in its weapons and it has a lot of inhabitants, but I doubht if it has the capability to develop technology to electronically hijack a high-tech spy device. That would require a solid education system, capable of producing a fair amount of qualified personal and a whole technologically-enabled society.
I am yet to see technological or scientific advances coming from iran. It would be very unlikely that all the highly trained people would be working for the army. It doesn't make sense.
Now there's something fishy with this whole thing. Sounds to easy and too advanced for iran. I don't really buy it that the US just sent a drone that was hijacked. Millions and millions of dollars thousands and thousands of people working full time on this and then it would just 'have a malfunction' and simply be captured... Nah, I have no idea what really happened, but all this sounds rather naive to me.
The aircraft probably can't turn back if the GPS signal is also jammed. If they jam the satellite control they probably jammed the GPS too.
Turning back without error without GPS require either better image recognition than what is publicly known today (I highly doubt it has that for navigation, plus its 4 years old), or very precise magnetic heading, plus a map, and track the position relative to the speed. Thats doable, but, I'm doubting it.
More likely, once all GPS and control signals were jammed, the plane went into fail-safe aka going straight til out of fuel.
I also doubt that the manual LOS control was unencrypted, but hey, who knows. AFAIK one earlier drone got issues because the video was analog non encrypted video...
China Joins Russia, Orders Military To Prepare For World War III
Extract:
Further evidence in these diplomatic pouches, this bulletin says, reveals that the United States is preparing an “ultimate solution” to the Middle East Crisis should nuclear war break out by attacking Syria and Iran with lethal biological agents intended to kill tens of millions of innocent civilians.
The discovery of the biological agent to be used by the West was revealed a fortnight ago by Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands who lead a team of scientists that discovered that a mere five mutations to the avian flu virus was sufficient to make it spread far more easily and would make it the most lethal killer of mankind ever invented.
Should the US begin an attack utilizing this deadly virus, this bulletin continues, its most likely method of delivery would be via its RQ-170 Sentinel Drone which is operated by the CIA.
These frightening assessments of future US actions against its enemies were revealed in this bulletin based upon Russian intelligence analysts examination of the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone brought down over Iranian territory last week by the Russian made Avtobaza ground-based electronic intelligence and jamming system used against this unmanned aerial vehicle with little damage and that showed it be equipped with a sophisticated aerosol delivery system.
-------
The source of this article is highly controversial. Story may or may not be true. Reference links included.
A few details about Iran, I personally consider established:
* Iran is not 'trying to produce nuclear weapons', as endlessly claimed by Israel/USA. Because Iran already possesses nuclear weapons, and has since the mid '90s. They bought a dozen or so from one of the ex-Soviet states, and probably more since.
Israel and USA governments know this. It is the sole reason Iran has not so far been attacked by Israel/USA. Fear of retaliation. If the Zionist entity could ever be sure they knew the location of all Iranian nukes, they'd attack within minutes.
* All the talk of 'Iranian nuclear weapons development' is Orwell-speak code, for the _real_ reason the Zionists loathe Iran's fully legal, peaceful nuclear power program. This is because Iran is refining Uranium fuel for their reactor. Also legal under international law. But... the byproduct is Depleted Uranium. Which may be used to produce DU anti-armor penetrating shells. There has never been an instance of Zionist armed forces (NATO, Isreal, USA, etc) facing on the battlefield an opponent possessing DU shells. That asymmetry is NATO's SOLE battlefield advantage. They are totally terrified of finding themselves in a real fight without that advantage.
* Iran is not the aggressor. Iran has NEVER been an aggressor. The true villains in this stand-off are Israel and their insane, megalomaniac 'Eretz Israel' expansionist ambition. With the USA as a politically captive thug acting on behalf of Israel.
I'm cheering for the Iranians. And I'm quite able to accept that the Zionists would be preparing to launch an unprovoked biological warfare attack on Iran. It's exactly the kind of thing Israel and the USA governments would do.
Here's hoping there's a Second American Revolution before these lunatics can start WWIII.
88 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] thread"Iran will take care to hide the drone well as the U.S. would likely try to destroy it if its location would be known. When the Chinese collected parts of a stealth F-117 stealth plane that was downed in Yugoslavia the U.S. bombed their embassy in Belgrade."
The second claim about the Chinese is ridiculous. But apart from that, assuming they have the drone intact, what will the Iranians actually learn from it? If I give you a PC motherboard, you can learn from it but to produce one is another thing altogether. Same for developing anti-drone electronic warfare technology. Most likely the drone information will be passed to the Russians, who may have had this idea all along.
It might have been a largely Russian operation using the Iranians as a proxy.
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2011/12/avtoba...
If that's the case it's a win win for both Iran and Russia. Iranians get the press coup of poking the US's eye whilst Russia walks away with an RQ-170 (to reverse engineer and resell to the Iranians of course).
edit: And to continue the baseless speculation, I think the drone has a transponder on a timer that is set to go off in 72 hours. Some hidden Iranian installation is going to light up like Las Vegas.
That was an interesting speculative leap. And about where my suspension of derision broke, reading the article. The US military gets a lot of things wrong with their gadgets, but comsec is not usually one of them.
Wired is about as reliable about security reporting as Fox News is about the DNC. They know their audience, and want to sell eyeballs.
Lets assume the drone is more or less blind to whatever happens above it as most of its sensors are pointed down and being stealth reduces its need to be aware of other planes (and forbids active radar). It should be feasible to approach it without being noticed and somehow entangling it (a net?) on its return flight, slowing it down (a parachute) until it runs out of fuel, and do it while jamming its communications so its owners won't have a clue of what's going on.
I think the worst problem is detecting it in the first place.
It's also, from what I understand, VERY slow - so much so that other aircraft have trouble going slow enough to keep pace with it.
It's a very unfortunate mistake to underestimate your opponents enough to give them your secret stealth drone.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12...
Getting back to the actual focus of my comment -- the original article leaps to "obviously, the Iranians have broken our encrypted controls" from an Iranian press release, without bothering to give even speculative support. I consider it far more plausible that something simpler has happened, such as dumb old software failure, or GPS spoofing.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16098562
http://theaviationist.com/2011/12/08/stealth-pix/
It appears that one or both wings might have been reconnected with tape. In short, there appears to be substantially more damage to the airframe than was otherwise suggested.
if I were designing these things I would make sure to include a package with enough destructive power to reduce the drone to very small pieces under those circumstances. They could fool GPS, but they shouldn't be able to fool inertial and visual guidance. Landing in one piece on enemy soil is unthinkable.
That said, you're right that it's probably a more reliable failsafe to attach some explosives and a GPS device, separate from all the rest of the electronics, as a way of depriving the enemy of the UAV than to rely on it to make it's way back home.
A drone with improper (or beaten) failsafes and countermeasures seems far more likely than a planted trojan.
And if modern history -- especially 21st century modern history -- is any guide, we can bet on two things: 1) The US's overestimation of its own technological advantages; 2) The US's underestimation of its enemies' technological capabilities.
Doesn't the cold war disprove both of those points?
The United States dramatically overestimated the USSR's military capabilities. For example, there may not have been any real "Missile Gap" http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/9/27/gap-missile-cia-...
I can't find a link at the moment, but the CIA grossly overestimated Russia's long-range bomber fleet from what it saw during a military parade - it turns out the Soviets had the same aircraft fly the parade route in a continuous loop.
Perhaps the real problem is our Military will often overestimate what technology is capable of, and is blind to some of its downsides.
We've underestimated Iran, Hezbollah, insurgent forces, etc., pretty routinely -- in terms of their technological capabilities, adaptability, and organizational sophistication.
I do agree with you, though, that we tend to overestimate what technology is capable of. I'd expand that point, however, and say that we overestimate what big, expensive hardware is capable of. And we underestimate low-tech, low-cost, jury-rigged, creative uses of technology.
Additionally, we tend to underestimate the diffusion -- be it through theft, connectivity, sale, espionage, or what have you -- of cutting edge technological know-how in today's world.
The truth is that an Iranian cowboy caught it with a lasso, in case any of you were wondering.
Edit: Undeniable proof of this article's absurdity: "Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code."
Because all you do is take a few encrypted flight control readings, put them into Code Breaker 2.0, then enjoy your brand new (previously owned) stealth drone, right?
My point is that it's not totally out of the question that Iran took hold of this drone via the LoS landing controls, if those landing controls are vulnerable to replay attack.
This whole post is just speculation. It happens to be interesting, which is cool, but I don't think anybody is making the claim that this author knows exactly what happened.
(But I agree the original claim was pretty far out).
If you mean peace, specifically with Iran, I think that's a stretch. America is actively trying to take down Iran's government, flying spy planes in its air space and sending in viruses that damage its equipment. Meanwhile, Iran is funding terrorist organizations who target the West and trying to build a nuclear bomb. This is not peace.
I'd like to read an analysis that draws parallels from the opposing ideologies in the current situation to the opposing ideologies of the Cold War.
In lisp it would look like:
Just think about it, there is so much news about this now, that any attack from US will face some internal opposition.
For all we know the plane was downed by the administration, to reduce the pressure from GOP's posturing of attack on Iran.
As rkon said, not worth reading. It is that stupid. Read only if you have some kind of fascination for human stupidity.
I'm in noway supportive of the Islamic regime, (or any other regime) but most of the comments here seem to be rooted in an underestimation of Iranian (Ar'yan) antiquity.
If you produce 5 apples this year and 10 apples next. You will have double your output.
However I will still have produced more than you.
The reason countries don't do it is because they can't get away with it.
I understand that most of the people in here are from California, NY or some advanced european country. Being a citizen of a not so developed european country, I would remind you that not every country has high tech at its disposal. Iran is a rather undeveloped country and it is governed by a rather radical form of islam, resourcing to all sorts of primitive oppression and practices which is everything but inovation friendly. Sure it puts a lot of money in its weapons and it has a lot of inhabitants, but I doubht if it has the capability to develop technology to electronically hijack a high-tech spy device. That would require a solid education system, capable of producing a fair amount of qualified personal and a whole technologically-enabled society.
I am yet to see technological or scientific advances coming from iran. It would be very unlikely that all the highly trained people would be working for the army. It doesn't make sense.
Now there's something fishy with this whole thing. Sounds to easy and too advanced for iran. I don't really buy it that the US just sent a drone that was hijacked. Millions and millions of dollars thousands and thousands of people working full time on this and then it would just 'have a malfunction' and simply be captured... Nah, I have no idea what really happened, but all this sounds rather naive to me.
The aircraft probably can't turn back if the GPS signal is also jammed. If they jam the satellite control they probably jammed the GPS too.
Turning back without error without GPS require either better image recognition than what is publicly known today (I highly doubt it has that for navigation, plus its 4 years old), or very precise magnetic heading, plus a map, and track the position relative to the speed. Thats doable, but, I'm doubting it.
More likely, once all GPS and control signals were jammed, the plane went into fail-safe aka going straight til out of fuel.
I also doubt that the manual LOS control was unencrypted, but hey, who knows. AFAIK one earlier drone got issues because the video was analog non encrypted video...
Not very accurate but should provide enough guidance for the plane to get out of hostile territory.
China Joins Russia, Orders Military To Prepare For World War III
Extract:
Further evidence in these diplomatic pouches, this bulletin says, reveals that the United States is preparing an “ultimate solution” to the Middle East Crisis should nuclear war break out by attacking Syria and Iran with lethal biological agents intended to kill tens of millions of innocent civilians.
The discovery of the biological agent to be used by the West was revealed a fortnight ago by Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands who lead a team of scientists that discovered that a mere five mutations to the avian flu virus was sufficient to make it spread far more easily and would make it the most lethal killer of mankind ever invented.
Should the US begin an attack utilizing this deadly virus, this bulletin continues, its most likely method of delivery would be via its RQ-170 Sentinel Drone which is operated by the CIA.
These frightening assessments of future US actions against its enemies were revealed in this bulletin based upon Russian intelligence analysts examination of the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone brought down over Iranian territory last week by the Russian made Avtobaza ground-based electronic intelligence and jamming system used against this unmanned aerial vehicle with little damage and that showed it be equipped with a sophisticated aerosol delivery system.
-------
The source of this article is highly controversial. Story may or may not be true. Reference links included.
A few details about Iran, I personally consider established:
* Iran is not 'trying to produce nuclear weapons', as endlessly claimed by Israel/USA. Because Iran already possesses nuclear weapons, and has since the mid '90s. They bought a dozen or so from one of the ex-Soviet states, and probably more since. Israel and USA governments know this. It is the sole reason Iran has not so far been attacked by Israel/USA. Fear of retaliation. If the Zionist entity could ever be sure they knew the location of all Iranian nukes, they'd attack within minutes.
* All the talk of 'Iranian nuclear weapons development' is Orwell-speak code, for the _real_ reason the Zionists loathe Iran's fully legal, peaceful nuclear power program. This is because Iran is refining Uranium fuel for their reactor. Also legal under international law. But... the byproduct is Depleted Uranium. Which may be used to produce DU anti-armor penetrating shells. There has never been an instance of Zionist armed forces (NATO, Isreal, USA, etc) facing on the battlefield an opponent possessing DU shells. That asymmetry is NATO's SOLE battlefield advantage. They are totally terrified of finding themselves in a real fight without that advantage.
* Iran is not the aggressor. Iran has NEVER been an aggressor. The true villains in this stand-off are Israel and their insane, megalomaniac 'Eretz Israel' expansionist ambition. With the USA as a politically captive thug acting on behalf of Israel.
I'm cheering for the Iranians. And I'm quite able to accept that the Zionists would be preparing to launch an unprovoked biological warfare attack on Iran. It's exactly the kind of thing Israel and the USA governments would do.
Here's hoping there's a Second American Revolution before these lunatics can start WWIII.
But I'm not very hopeful.