
Drug Traffickers Are Spoofing Border Drones - kushti
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/12/DHS-Drug-Traffickers-Spoofing-Border-Drones/124613/
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michaelt

      The ShadowHawk uses military-grade encryption and changes
      GPS frequencies every half second, according to Buscher.
    

That doesn't sound true - the GPS satellites don't do frequency hopping, you
get 1575.42MHz, 1227.60MHz and that's it. All the linked paper says is that
you can use the precise time from a GPS receiver to start up a different radio
system that needs precise timing.

~~~
moron4hire
LOL "Military Grade". Anything that is labeled "Military Grade" means it has
gone through a long, bureaucratic specification and procurement process. The
spec is obsolete by the time it actually gets anywhere. With the pace of
progress these days, "Military Grade" means "5 years old."

~~~
FLUX-YOU
I'm starting to think the same of healthcare software, except we call it
"Hospital Grade"

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roymurdock
> UAVs helped in just 2 percent of apprehensions on the southwest border. The
> audit came out just as DHS was asking Congress to give it $443 million for
> another 14 Reapers, also called Predator Bs, which the agency received.

So we spent $360m (at least, probably more due to creative accounting cited in
article) on spoofable, hackable, drones since 2005. Then, instead of waiting
for an audit, Congress greenlights another $443 to purchase 14 more of the
same 2% value added drones which were designed to carry out strike missions in
Afghanistan.

Why?

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Wingman4l7
Why do you think? Because that's what's on offer by the military contractors
who have manufacturing plants in those senator's districts -- so that's what
they buy.

Or, if you prefer the faith-in-humanity answer: career politicians don't have
an understanding of statistics.

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imglorp
There's plenty of aviation navigation methods aside from GPS, some of which
will fit on a small processor. We've been doing optical/radar terrain map
following for decades in cruise missiles for example. There's also inertial,
celestial, VOR/NDB/TACAN, ADF and others. A smart navigator will use multiple
methods; if one of its methods begins to disagree from the others, it can be
downweighted.

~~~
blacksmythe

      >> inertial, ...
    

A nice discussion of inertial navigation capability
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294)):

    
    
        Consumer grade MEMS ...are not sufficient for intertial navigation, ... 
    
        At around the $2K-30K you get systems that can 
        provide accurate navigation for up to 2 minutes or so. 
    
        Aviation grade IMUs ... maximum horizontal position drift of 1.5km 
        in the first hour of operation. These will run 100K and up.

~~~
moron4hire
One uses inertial systems to cover for disruptions in service of the other
systems.

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moron4hire
"Harden against attack". You mean "correct defects in design". The phrasing
here implies that the state the drones are in is an acceptable one for most
situations, just not this one. But it's an unacceptable state for any drones
to be spoofable at all.

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sbierwagen
Note that Iran captured a RQ-170 drone back in 2011, possibly using GPS
spoofing, so obviously using the encrypted military GPS signal isn't a perfect
solution.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident)

(How did they do it? Who knows. Maybe they jammed the encrypted channel, and
spoofed the civilian channel, so when the drone fell back onto the unencrypted
channel it was receiving bad navigation information)

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UnoriginalGuy
What strange is, if you read the article, an Iranian engineer claimed that it
was GPS spoofing, but the US claims it's primary means of navigation is an
inertial navigation system (which seems highly believable given up sketchy GPS
can sometimes be).

Plus the Iranians have a video of it smoothly landing at an Iranian airbase
(which completely discredits the US's assertions that it crashed, and broke
up).

~~~
sbierwagen
IMUs are wildly expensive, and still have quite a lot of drift:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294)

Certainly the RQ-170 _has_ an IMU, and I could believe it might use it as the
primary means of navigation, but it's almost certainly corrected by GPS, which
gives you a means of altering the drone's path by GPS spoofing.

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underbluewaters
It would be pretty "funny" if all this military hardware coming home results
in countermeasures being developed by drug traffickers that ends up back in
Afghanistan. These guys probably have a freer hand and more funding to develop
those sorts of tools.

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PaulAJ
Time to revive the old joke:

Q: How do you smuggle a nuke into America?

A: Hide it in a bale of mary jane.

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jkot
> _The bad guys on the border have lots of money and what they are putting
> money into is into spoofing and jamming GPS systems_

GPS jammer is under $50

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
A unit that can jam my cellphone within a few feet is; jamming an aircraft at
altitude is an entirely different class of device (if only for power output
reasons).

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elmar
The use of General Atomics Predators on homeland security as been a complete
Fiasco.

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rwmj
_" The bad guys" ..._ An unfortunate choice of words. Who are the bad guys in
this situation? The drug traffickers? The militarized police force? The
politicians supporting prohibition? Probably all of them.

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67726e
Definitely the guys who butcher people and leave them in 55 gallon drums. I'm
hardly gonna blame the border patrol for doing their job which is guarding the
border.

~~~
kingkawn
Guarding the border against an import industry that is worth billions of
dollars and is illegal because our political system is beholden to retrograde
moralizing.

~~~
avn2109
>> "...beholden to retrograde moralizing."

I wish that was the only reason for the drug war, but moralizing is probably a
relatively minor factor. I claim the bigger reasons are:

1) The prison-industrial complex is large and politically powerful, and it
needs drug "criminals"

2) Many recreational drugs make the working populace less productive. They'd
be blowing lines of coke and screwing each other all day or giggling at
Spongebob after smoking a bowl instead of diligently churning out more boxes
at the packing plant. Drugs that make you more productive are perfectly legal
and widely prescribed (Adderall etc).

3) Many popular drugs are easily produced at home in quantities appropriate
for individual use. You can trivially grow enough weed at home to support a
serious habit. The man hates that and prefers drugs that are only amenable to
production on a vast industrial scale, such that monopoly, taxation, and
centralized control of production are easy. Tobacco and the aforementioned
psychostimulants are the _ne plus ultra_ industrial-only drugs; it's no
cooincidence that they're quite legal.

~~~
merpnderp
I'm all for ending the horrible consequences of prohibition, but people often
ignore or gloss over that a lot of the war on drugs was requested by poor
communities who had to deal with the consequences of high levels of drug use.
When you're poor and can't move elsewhere, you turn to the police to get the
heroin junkies off your front lawn or out of your apartment complex hallways.
Which is too bad because it is really a job for social workers.

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supergirl
"military-grade encryption" lol

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draw_down
This is silly.

