
Taking a look at a covert CIA virtual fencing solution [video] - Jerry2
https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10642-harry_potter_and_the_not-so-smart_proxy_war
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Dinux
It should be mentioned that this work was mostly speculation, like the speaker
said.

Most of the attacks shown are not 'advanced' by any means. Like the speaker
explained; _' anyone can buy a GPS jammer for a few bucks online'_. The
research they did indeed confirmed GPS is the weakspot. However, such geofence
systems are a step-up from any equipment lacking this ability. Its not so much
about rendering these systems completely unusable outside of their intended
purpose, but more about slowing down their use. The later will have a much
better chance of accomplishing this goal.

Assuming the claims made in this research are true, then its more likely the
CIA wants to limit the use of _US_ supplied weapons systems, not stop a war.
And the CIA has quite the history there.

Also, the situations in which such weapons systems are deployed do not exactly
resemble the lab-like circumstances (like faraday cage, EE-tooling et.)
necessary for these attacks.

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onetimemanytime
this is critical, considering that today's "allies" are very likely to be our
enemies tomorrow. Or they can just sell ManPads to another group and (mil
and/or civilian) planes would be falling out of the skies. Imagine if Stingers
we gave to the Taliban were still in working mode...

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wavefunction
This seems like it will lead to more CIA arming of militant groups which
according to your post means likely more enemy militant groups. I'd liken this
to giving police officers tasers or firearms: instead of having to consider
de-escalating situations, they can just shoot or tase someone instead.

I would prefer my government be forced to carefully consider whether giving
any group weapons rather than "oh yeah totally cool we've got ways to shut
them down if they turn on us."

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perl4ever
I'm glad the CIA is doing something; I guess virtual fencing hasn't really
been a thing since the Summer Olympics tie-in games of the 80s. I'm surprised,
really, given the existence of "Bus Simulator", "Farming Simulator" and so on,
I would have thought there would be lots of ultra realistic virtual fencing.
But a minute or two Googling didn't turn anything up - mostly people discuss
fencing-like activities in random games with swordplay.

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tlb
The article mentions that the term 'fencing' is used in the sense of
prohibiting electronic devices from working outside a geographic region to
avoid their use as weapons, rather than swordfighting.

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perl4ever
Well, if it's _covert_ , then that is presumably just the cover story.

Maybe it's a solution for region control _of swords_ , in which case it would
be a virtual virtual fencing fencing solution.

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nl
Geeze - I'm all for freely discussing engineering but wow I'm not sure I've
ever seen a more directly dangerous piece of work.

For those who haven't read what this is about: The system is designed to stop
weapon systems working outside specific geographic areas. This is so (for
example) the US can arm a specific group in a conflict and if (when?) those
arms fall into the wrong hands they are useless outside the area of that
conflict.

This work discusses weaknesses in the lockdown system. It's pretty advanced
work, so it isn't like a script-kiddie is going to work this out themselves.

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maxfan8
I agree. Presenting on Protego doesn't seem like a good idea – the information
given in this talk could aid terrorists.

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Buge
It could also aid the CIA in making a more secure virtual fencing solution.
It's similar to the debate about full disclosure vs coordinated disclosure.
Some companies pay for bug bounties.

Additionally it could convince the CIA to distribute less weapons.

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maxfan8
This is a good point! However, the CIA surely has sufficient internal
incentives to fix privately disclosed vulnerabilities. There is no need for
"bad publicity" to motivate them to become more secure. The CIA may even have
already started working on fixes after Vault 7. Who knows?

The only thing this action serves to do is allow less than trusted third
parties abuse the weapons given to them (a possibility that the speaker
clearly recognizes).

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Buge
> the CIA surely has sufficient internal incentives to fix privately disclosed
> vulnerabilities.

Do they? Also various people could have different definitions of "sufficient".
They might previously have had 3 people spending half their time on it, and
this might cause them to increase it to 5 people working full time on it.

Do major tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft) have less internal
incentives than the CIA?

This XSS vulnerability apparently took a year to be fixed:
[https://www.openbugbounty.org/reports/164180/](https://www.openbugbounty.org/reports/164180/)

