
AR Drone That Infects Other Drones With Virus Wins DroneGames - eguizzo
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/ar-drone-that-infects-other-drones-with-virus-wins-dronegames#.UMD0EHJvf8o.hackernews
======
biot
This reminds me of a time in high school where I participated in a physics
olympics competition. One of the events was to construct a bridge out of
provided materials capable of supporting the most weight. The score you
received was calculated as:

    
    
      (sum of weights supported) / (time taken to place weights)
    

The winning team placed a really small amount of weight in what the judges
measured as 0.1 seconds of time. They cleverly gamed the rules to take
advantage that a small time would act as a multiplier. Our team came in second
for that event even though our bridge supported many times the weight theirs
did, even if you took as long as you wanted to place the weights. It was a bit
of an abuse of the rules and I felt it went against the spirit of the
competition which was to engineer a solid bridge.

In this situation, by crippling potentially better drones the virus copter may
have ended up technically winning but the measure by which it won may be
different than what was intended. That said, it will definitely bring to the
forefront a better approach to security which will have long-term benefits.

~~~
cs702
I'm not sure your analogy applies in this case. The team that won the
DroneGames HAD the BEST strategy: crippling the other drones!

This reminds of a story I heard a long time ago about a fighter in the middle
of some nasty civil war who complained to a TV reporter: "no one here respects
the Law of The Jungle anymore!"

~~~
biot
<http://dronegames.co/> doesn't state what the judging criteria is. If it's
"survive to the end" then why not heavily shield your drone, bolt it to a
fixed stand, affix a heavy EMP generator, and fry all the other electronics in
the room? Your drone won't be able to do anything useful as it's bolted down
but its shielding will at least allow the electronics to blink some lights and
technically you could win on that fact alone.

Presumably such a tactic would violate the spirit, which I take to be
demonstrating cool and unique capabilities without having to deal with hostile
threats. However, I haven't been following, so perhaps drone to drone
interference is actively encouraged and expected.

------
cs702
A clever strategy that few thought of; it deserved to win.

On the downside, this is surely going to give me nightmares about government
drones getting infected with a terrorist virus and unleashing drone-botnet-
mageddon on the masses.

~~~
sliverstorm
How quaint, a terrorist virus? No, it'll probably just be normal government
drones with normal government software that unleashes drone-ageddon on the
masses.

Whether it's a robot uprising, or a bug/oversight in the software, or Big
Brother, is up to your own personal taste in dystopian horrors.

~~~
r00fus
The terrorist virus is simply plausible deniability so the government can
continue it's progression towards new world order.

I mean, who really thought Bin Laden had that much power or legitimacy?

~~~
lostlogin
Bin laden had legitimacy? I'd say that he did until he started organising the
killing of people.

~~~
arethuza
I don't remember anyone in the West complaining when he was organising the
killing of Soviet soldiers.

~~~
ajuc
Maybe it's because these soldiers were on Afghani terrain without Afghan
people permission?

~~~
arethuza
Oh - I wasn't trying to defend him - he was a monster. But, like Saddam
Hussein, the West regarded him for long periods as a _useful_ monster.

------
gorrillamcd
What's interesting is the "virus" could be combined with the second-place
winner ("multidrone") to make a drone botnet instead of just having the
infected drones "run amok".

~~~
stephengillie
Could we set up a mesh network on that drone-botnet? How much storage would
each one have? We could hide that datacenter in a cloud!

~~~
gorrillamcd
Actually, there's some practical application for that. In an emergency
situation where communication is down, a network of drones could be setup to
provide a network for first-responders and aid-workers to coordinate their
efforts. It could even tie-in to base stations that would have the long-range
power to connect different meshes. (note: I know nothing about these drones,
but looking at what's been done already, it's seems feasible).

~~~
sliverstorm
Or you could just use skilled radio operators.

Though I suppose those _have_ been getting scarcer than sophisticated drones
anymore :(

~~~
TeMPOraL
Can you run IP over Skilled Radio Operators?

That kind of drone network could be useful for transmitting video, or other
important data that isn't that good to send by voice. Not to mention remotely
controling the other drones, that would do things like searching for people in
the rubble.

~~~
sliverstorm
Not sure if TCP/IP has been done, but packet radio
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio>] is a thing.

That said, you don't need digital transmission for a video signal
[<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television>] or for remotely
controlling things. A more sophisticated network like that provided by TCP/IP
is always a nice thing to have, but you pay the price in terms of lost range
when you start trying to use WiFi for everything. My little handheld radio can
reach up to 5 miles; my WiFi station might go 500 feet. Which link would you
rather have in a disaster?

It's true, robots can enhance the capabilities of rescue operations, but the
comment I replied to was specifically talking about using drones to establish
lines of communication. My point is that we already _have_ that, and it
doesn't require a hundred drones in the air.

You might also be interested in APRS
[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_Syst...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Packet_Reporting_System)]

~~~
gorrillamcd
Well, it's a pretty far-fetched idea anyways, but, a few things to consider:

\- I never said you have to use wifi. You're right that radio would have a
much greater range. \- The main advantage I can think of for a system like
this would be speed of deployment. In an area with poor line of sight, they
could be used to bridge the gap until a proper base-station can be positioned.
\- They're more versatile. For example, they could be used as a mobile PA
system. \- Of course, it's all hypothetical. Nevertheless, it'd be fun to
implement and more useful than the Pirate Bay's idea of a flying datacenter.

~~~
sliverstorm
Even better, how about using teams of drones to _deploy_ basestations? :)

------
enraged_camel
What I liked about this the most is that the winning team thought outside the
box. While most people focused on "how do we make this drone fly better?"
these guys focused on "how do we sabotage the other drones?"

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paupino_masano
The source code for this is on Github: <https://github.com/substack/virus-
copter>

~~~
0x0
Did I read that correctly, that you can simply telnet to the copter's IP
address and get a (root?) shell just like that?

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Not awfully surprising. It's a toy, not a Predator. Security likely was not a
major design concern, and I don't really blame them. Probably even intentional
to a degree, to make (owner-sourced) hacking easier.

~~~
0x0
Not complaining, just slightly surprised. I thought you'd have to go to an
extra effort to remove the username+password prompt from the standard telnetds
:)

~~~
zb
Random factoid: the prompt actually comes from getty, not telnetd.

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mephi5t0
The Game of Drones. Winter is coming.

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saym
This 'virus' shows how open the drones truly are. Let's get started on a
security module!

I think the AR Drones provide a great platform that non-programmers can get
excited about and in turn want to program themselves.

The drone is a perfect combination of functionality and openness.

~~~
sp332
"Security module"? You can't bolt-on security.

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kunil
This sounds weird to me. How do they infect a system that they never saw
before? Did the wrote the virus on the fly? Or those drones have a common
library with a bug or something.

This is like a Hollywood movie with a bad script

~~~
Aissen
The drones are identical for this competition; and are running an unprotected
telnet server on the same wireless network. Just look at the code:
<https://github.com/substack/virus-copter>

This only proves that the organizers had no technical background whatsoever.

~~~
yardie
These are the retail standard AR Drones with their own Wifi APs and telnetd
enabled. It's not the organizers job to secure them. Would you expect the
Defcon organizers to do the same for the attendees?

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tmarthal
I know it's science-fiction, but the 2010 book <a
href="[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief>The](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief>The)
Quantum Thief</a> makes use of weapons like these: basically firing a missile
to get physical access to your adversary's computer systems with some sort of
payload, and that payload of which will scan and disrupt the opponent's
system.

~~~
Ingaz
More realistic episode was in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikokugai:_The_Cyber_Slayer> .

Physical attack on enemy corporation was just a diversion. The real attack was
on corporation network. Main computer gone nuts and started selling and buying
in most ineffective way. Corporation was destroyed after several minutes.

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phy6
They tried this in Terminator Salvation, it was just a honeypot. Here's
another nefarious use for AR drones:
[http://static.usenix.org/events/woot11/tech/final_files/Reed...](http://static.usenix.org/events/woot11/tech/final_files/Reed.pdf)

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dkersten
Next time they should combine these with this:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU>

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wingerlang
Is there any video of this in action?

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kleiba
OMG!!! What if terrorists did the same thing to turn drones against us?? We
need more drones to fly above the current generation of drones and monitor
them NOW!

