[time-nuts] "The GPS navigation is the weakest point,"

Thu Dec 15 23:21:49 UTC 2011

OK, now I know what a GPS simulator is like. BTW the Spirent is cheaper at
used-line.com than on paybay. Anyway my opinion doesn't change: as pointed
out by David VanHorn they have jammed the GPS and the data link. I think
the data link must be a sophisticated frequency hopping type radio link so,
at most, their skill was to jam that.

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 12:04 AM, J. Forster <jfor at quikus.com> wrote:

> I'm not so sure. What if you has one site, antenna, and transmitter and a
> dozen signal sources with programmable synthesizers and coders.
>
> The drone antenna is likely omni. The Russians or Chinese could easily
> supply that.
>
> -John
>
> ================
>
>
> > Fascinating.
> >
> > I can picture setting up a bunch of transmitters in the hills to send out
> > strong GPS-like signals to mimic the real thing. I suppose you could
> > control those signals to fool the device it is somewhere else. That bit
> is
> > very clever - you'd have to adjust the signals taking into account
> current
> > positions of all current satellites. Smart bit of work there.
> >
> > But it would also need incredible timing. Even a few ns out and it
> > wouldn't
> > work. So how do you set up fantastic timing at different locations of
> > transmitters throughout a country. Well you've blocked the GPS - so
> that's
> > no good.
> >
> > It would require local atomic clocks (good ones) at each location.
> >
> > Do they have access to such things? Maybe I'm being naive.
> >
> > Jim
> >
> >
> > On 16 December 2011 08:10, J. Forster <jfor at quikus.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Iran hijacked US drone, claims Iranian engineer  Tells Christian Science
> >> Monitor that CIA's spy aircraft was 'spoofed' into landing in enemy
> >> territory instead of its home base in Afghanistan
> >> Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside
> >> hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to
> >> the
> >> US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the
> >> captured
> >> drone's systems inside Iran.
> >>
> >> Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off
> >> communications
> >> links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who
> >> works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently
> >> trying
> >> to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could
> >> not
> >> be named for his safety.
> >>
> >> Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a
> >> technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the
> >> Iranian
> >> specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it
> >> land
> >> in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in
> >> Afghanistan.
> >>
> >> "The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the
> >> Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's
> >> "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise
> >> [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This
> >> is
> >> where the bird loses its brain."
> >>
> >> The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into
> >> account
> >> precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data
> >> –
> >> made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to
> >> crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control
> >> center, says the engineer.
> >>
> >> The revelations about Iran's apparent electronic prowess come as the US,
> >> Israel, and some European nations appear to be engaged in an
> >> ever-widening
> >> covert war with Iran, which has seen assassinations of Iranian nuclear
> >> scientists, explosions at Iran's missile and industrial facilities, and
> >> the
> >> Stuxnet computer virus that set back Iran’s nuclear program.
> >>
> >> Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most
> >> sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The
> >> techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less
> >> sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the
> >> engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS
> >> signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.
> >> Rock Center: Iran's growing influence in
> >> Iraq<
> >>
> http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/13/9398341-a-growing-iranian-threat-in-wake-of-us-military-withdrawal-from-iraq-this-month
> >> >
> >>
> >> Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS
> >> spoofing
> >> indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is
> >> plausible.
> >>
> >> "Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation,
> >> says
> >> former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding
> >> that
> >> it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it
> >> flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the
> >> technology
> >> is there.”
> >>
> >> In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have
> >> downloaded
> >> live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with
> >> inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to
> >> actually take control of a drone is far more significant.
> >>
> >> Iran asserted its ability to do this in September, as pressure mounted
> >> over
> >> its nuclear program.
> >>
> >> Gen. Moharam Gholizadeh, the deputy for electronic warfare at the air
> >> defense headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),
> >> described to Fars News how Iran could alter the path of a GPS-guided
> >> missile – a tactic more easily applied to a slower-moving drone.
> >>
> >> *Downed US drone: How Iran caught the
> >> 'beast'*<
> >>
> http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/1209/Downed-US-drone-How-Iran-caught-the-beast
> >> >
> >>
> >> “We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning
> >> ‘deception’ of the aggressive systems,” said Gholizadeh, such that “we
> >> can
> >> define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile
> >> would
> >> change to our desired destination.”
> >>
> >> Gholizadeh said that “all the movements of these [enemy drones]” were
> >> being
> >> watched, and “obstructing” their work was “always on our agenda.”
> >>
> >> That interview has since been pulled from Fars’ Persian-language
> >> website.
> >> And last month, the relatively young Gholizadeh died of a heart attack,
> >> which some Iranian news sites called suspicious – suggesting the
> >> electronic
> >> warfare expert may have been a casualty in the covert war against Iran.
> >>
> >> *Iran's growing electronic capabilities
> >> *Iranian lawmakers say the drone capture is a "great epic" and claim to
> >> be
> >> "in the final steps of breaking into the aircraft's secret code."
> >>
> >> Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Fox News on Dec. 13 that the US
> >> will
> >> "absolutely" continue the drone campaign over Iran, looking for evidence
> >> of
> >> any nuclear weapons work. But the stakes are higher for such
> >> surveillance,
> >> now that Iran can apparently disrupt the work of US drones.
> >>
> >> US officials skeptical of Iran’s capabilities blame a malfunction, but
> >> so
> >> far can't explain how Iran acquired the drone intact. One American
> >> analyst
> >> ridiculed Iran’s capability, telling Defense News that the loss was
> >> “like
> >> dropping a Ferrari into an ox-cart technology culture.”
> >>
> >> A former senior Iranian official who asked not to be named said: "There
> >> are
> >> a lot of human resources in Iran.... Iran is not like Pakistan."
> >>
> >> “Technologically, our distance from the Americans, the Zionists, and
> >> other
> >> advanced countries is not so far to make the downing of this plane seem
> >> like a dream for us … but it could be amazing for others,” deputy IRGC
> >> commander Gen. Hossein Salami said this week.
> >> Iran: Obama should apologize for drone
> >> 'spying'<
> >>
> http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/13/9417003-iran-obama-should-apologize-for-drone-spying-operation
> >> >
> >>
> >> According to a European intelligence source, Iran shocked Western
> >> intelligence agencies in a previously unreported incident that took
> >> place
> >> sometime in the past two years, when it managed to “blind” a CIA spy
> >> satellite by “aiming a laser burst quite accurately.”
> >>
> >> More recently, Iran was able to hack Google security certificates, says
> >> the
> >> engineer. In September, the Google accounts of 300,000 Iranians were
> >> made
> >> accessible by hackers. The targeted company said "circumstantial
> >> evidence"
> >> pointed to a "state-driven attack" coming from Iran, meant to snoop on
> >> users.
> >>
> >> Cracking the protected GPS coordinates on the Sentinel drone was no more
> >> difficult, asserts the engineer.
> >>
> >> *US knew of GPS systems' vulnerability
> >> *Use of drones has become more risky as adversaries like Iran hone
> >> countermeasures. The US military has reportedly been aware of
> >> vulnerabilities with pirating unencrypted drone data streams since the
> >> Bosnia campaign in the mid-1990s.
> >> Top US officials said in 2009 that they were working to encrypt all
> >> drone
> >> data streams in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan – after finding militant
> >> laptops loaded with days' worth of data in Iraq – and acknowledged that
> >> they were "subject to listening and exploitation."Perhaps as easily
> >> exploited are the GPS navigational systems upon which so much of the
> >> modern
> >> military depends.
> >> "GPS signals are weak and can be easily outpunched [overridden] by
> >> poorly
> >> controlled signals from television towers, devices such as laptops and
> >> MP3
> >> players, or even mobile satellite services," Andrew Dempster, a
> >> professor
> >> from the University of New South Wales School of Surveying and Spatial
> >> Information Systems, told a March conference on GPS vulnerability in
> >> Australia.
> >>
> >> "This is not only a significant hazard for military, industrial, and
> >> civilian transport and communication systems, but criminals have worked
> >> out
> >> how they can jam GPS," he says.
> >>
> >> *Unmanned drone attacks and shape-shifting robots: War's remote-control
> >> future*<
> >>
> http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2011/1022/Unmanned-drone-attacks-and-shape-shifting-robots-War-s-remote-control-future
> >> >
> >>
> >> The US military has sought for years to fortify or find alternatives to
> >> the
> >> GPS system of satellites, which are used for both military and civilian
> >> purposes. In 2003, a “Vulnerability Assessment Team” at Los Alamos
> >> National
> >> Laboratory published research explaining how weak GPS signals were
> >> easily
> >> overwhelmed with a stronger local signal.
> >>
> >> “A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS
> >> signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time
> >> that
> >> it is not,” reads the Los Alamos report. “In a sophisticated spoofing
> >> attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving
> >> target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false
> >> position.”
> >>
> >> The vulnerability remains unresolved, and a paper presented at a Chicago
> >> communications security conference in October laid out parameters for
> >> successful spoofing of both civilian and military GPS units to allow a
> >> "seamless takeover" of drones or other targets.
> >>
> >> To “better cope with hostile electronic attacks,” the US Air Force in
> >> late
> >> September awarded two $47 million contracts to develop a "navigation
> >> warfare" system to replace GPS on aircraft and missiles, according to
> >> the
> >> Defense Update website.
> >>
> >> Official US data on GPS describes "the ongoing GPS modernization
> >> program"
> >> for the Air Force, which "will enhance the jam resistance of the
> >> military
> >> GPS service, making it more robust."
> >>
> >> *Why the drone's underbelly was damaged
> >> *Iran's drone-watching project began in 2007, says the Iranian engineer,
> >> and then was stepped up and became public in 2009 – the same year that
> >> the
> >> RQ-170 was first deployed in Afghanistan with what were then
> >> state-of-the-art surveillance systems.
> >> In January, Iran said it had shot down two conventional (nonstealth)
> >> drones, and in July, Iran showed Russian experts several US drones –
> >> including one that had been watching over the underground uranium
> >> enrichment facility at Fordo, near the holy city of Qom.
> >>
> >> In capturing the stealth drone this month at Kashmar, 140 miles inside
> >> northeast Iran, the Islamic Republic appears to have learned from two
> >> years
> >> of close observation.
> >>
> >> Iran displayed the drone on state-run TV last week, with a dent in the
> >> left
> >> wing and the undercarriage and landing gear hidden by anti-American
> >> banners.
> >>
> >> The Iranian engineer explains why: "If you look at the location where we
> >> made it land and the bird's home base, they both have [almost] the same
> >> altitude," says the Iranian engineer. "There was a problem [of a few
> >> meters] with the exact altitude so the bird's underbelly was damaged in
> >> landing; that's why it was covered in the broadcast footage."
> >>
> >> Prior to the disappearance of the stealth drone earlier this month,
> >> Iran’s
> >> electronic warfare capabilities were largely unknown – and often
> >> dismissed.
> >>
> >> "We all feel drunk [with happiness] now," says the Iranian engineer.
> >> "Have
> >> you ever had a new laptop? Imagine that excitement multiplied
> >> many-fold."
> >> When the Revolutionary Guard first recovered the drone, they were aware
> >> it
> >> might be rigged to self-destruct, but they "were so excited they could
> >> not
> >> stay away."
> >>
> >> ** **Scott Peterson* <
> http://www.csmonitor.com/tags/topic/Scott+Peterson
> >> >*,
> >> the Monitor's Middle East correspondent, wrote this story with an
> >> Iranian
> >> journalist who publishes under the pen name Payam Faramarzi and cannot
> >> be
> >> further identified for security reasons.
> >> *
> >>
> >> *© 2011 The Christian Science Monitor*
> >>
> >> <
> >>
> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45685870/ns/world_news-christian_science_monitor/#
> >> >
> >>
> >>
> >> Best,
> >>
> >> -John
> >> ===============
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at febo.com
> >> To unsubscribe, go to
> >> https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
> >> and follow the instructions there.
> >>
> >
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at febo.com
> To unsubscribe, go to
> https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
> and follow the instructions there.
>