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If this is what it looks like, this is bad for everyone who isn’t Iran: after claiming the capture of a downed, super-advanced American drone in 2011, we now have what looks like decoded video straight from its brain.
The video, which The Aviationist’s David Cenciotti says is indeed shot “from the FLIR turret of the RQ-170″ Reaper drone, clearly shows Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan — a vital limb of the American military presence in the region. Fears over the drone’s capture had been tempered by the fact that any onboard data would either be damaged or encrypted beyond the point of salvage. Clearly that’s not the case, as the video above is as crisp as anything you’d see straight out of the Pentagon.
There’s the possibility that the video is fake, sure. But the locale depicted looks exactly like KAF, which would be impossible for Iran to access itself. This doesn’t mean the Iranian intelligence apparatus has access to any UAV missions the US is running now, but if another drone were to go down in the future — highly probable — this means its visual cargo is in danger. There’s also no telling what else was onboard the Reaper Iran still has onboard. [The Aviationist]
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It’s usually troublesome when you think you always have the best tech that no one can crack/hack ..
The RQ-170 is the Setinel, not the Reaper.
Not too worried about this, even if it is true. It’s not like these things crash that often, and if it takes more than a year to retrieve these images, any intelligence gained would likely be out of date.
The more intelligence your adversary collects, the higher the chance they can create a trend, interpolate the methods you use to obtain intelligence, and extrapolate your future plans — Even if the data is outdated.
Yes, yes, all intel helps, for sure, but its value is seriously diminished when it’s a year old. Combine this with the fact that drones don’t generally fall out of the sky…
Yeah haha, if it takes 1 year to get one piece of intel, well that won’t get them anywhere.
If they decrypted the video, they probably now have a foot in the door when it comes to decrypting the command-and-control radio streams, meaning they could theoretically jam or hijack US drones.
That’s a bit of a jump. Just because they can supposedly pull a video off a storage device doesn’t mean that they’ve figured out the entire command and control system, or that they can hack it in real time.
That said, poking around the thing must have given them some significant insight.
Crash? You mean captured? It should have at least had a bloody self destruct!
The Americans say it crashed, the Iranians say they hacked it. Neither has publicly proven their statement.
Lol I say bullshit, Iran used a GPS trick to feed the drone with false GPS data, therefore, making it land thinking it landed where it was supposed to.
That’s not a hack LOL and if it was crashed then why the hell was it in one piece looking a lot better than the time it took off? Americans chat so much shit lol
No aircraft uses GPS data as its primary navigation device. In the event that the GPS position conflicted with the INS, the INS position would be used instead. That’s what would happen on a commercial airliner, and it’s even more likely that this would be the procedure on a military aircraft as GPS spoofing is a known (and relatively simple) means of confusing the aircraft’s systems. Military jets also have access to more advanced navigation systems like terrain matching, which together with INS, could form a multiple redundant system.
I’m not saying that the Iranians didn’t ‘hack’ it in some way, I’m just saying that the GPS spoofing argument is pretty thin.
It’s not from where I can see the evidence so far, they made it land safely and that’s the only possible way they did it.
Not necessarily. The drone may have actually suffered a serious malfunction (such as a total loss of power) that caused it to land in a semi controlled manner. A crash land, or a flat spin.
Well it didn’t since they showed it working perfectly fine! You might wanna read up and watch a few things before making a pointless speculative comment based on nothing!
OK, enlighten me then. Where is your irrefutable source that proves that it’s working fine?
You’re damn right I was speculating, which is why I’m using words like ‘not necessarily’ and ‘may have’. I’m not passing anything it off as fact, I’m merely pointing out possibilities in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.
Google is your friend, furthermore, they managed to extract all its info and made a working drone out of it that managed to get to Israel without any problem. Since you would have difficulties finding this as well, here you go:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/29/iran-drone-photos-israel-bases_n_2038168.html
A story about how Iran’s drone technology is improving. This is hardly relevant to the RQ-170 incident – Iran had been developing drone technology for years before they got their hands on the Sentinel. The Shahed-129 drone mentioned in the article has been in development since 2007 (yes, I Googled that). In fact, the only line in this story that directly references the incident is:
“Iran said it has recovered data from the RQ-170 Sentinel and claimed it was building its own replica.”
So what’s your point?
Also, you can cut the insulting language.
You should have checked that link I left for you before leaving this comment “Iran said it has recovered data from the RQ-170 Sentinel and claimed it was building its own replica:.
They made it and used it.
I think they should hav a self destruct system, they can never be 100% sure that it will never be hacked a just in case option should be onboard.
The video won’t be heavily encrypted, it would take too much processing power to put a strong encryption on a video as you record it.
Considering that my PC encrypts data to its BitLocker drive in real-time, and that its 128-bit AES encrypted data would take many years for a supercomputer to hack with a brute force attack, I don’t think it would be that hard for a drone costing tens of millions to encrypt its video feed on the fly.
These drones have less processing power then a pentium 4, when they say military equipment is advanced they mean that it wont break. A raspberry pi probably has a better CPU then these drones.
You think that the military hasn’t been funnelling money into cryptography hardware for decades?
I’ll just leave this here:
http://mil-embedded.com/articles/case-enables-uav-communications-control/
Thats for communication, we are talking about the drones camera here.
Yes, and those communications include live imagery. That’s how the pilots fly the thing. If you want to take that compressed, encrypted feed and dump it to a storage device, that’s pretty easy to do.
It goes Camera > Storage > Comunication
The communication part is heavily encrypted (AES 128bit if i recall correctly), hence why the iranians haven’t got the mission data, but the camera storage is not as heavily encrypted.
If they increased the encryption on the camera storage then there would be a bigger lag between what the camera sees and what they see.
Yeah, I’m not actually suggesting that this data must have been encrypted. I suspect it wasn’t, perhaps being stored to some sort of quick access recorder. Like you say, 128-bit AES is bloody hard to crack, the Iranians would not have managed it. However, I’m just pointing out that the technology to do it is readily available and is quite common in the military.
Here’s the latest version of the standard radio used by the US military in their aircraft and ground vehicles. Apparently it has a real-time encrypt/decrypt capacity in the gigabit range, which is more than enough for video:
http://www.rockwellcollins.com/sitecore/content/Data/Products/Communications_and_Networks/Communication_Radios/AN-ARC-210_Gen_V_Programmable_Digital_Communication_System.aspx
Im not sure where you’re basing all this form, just because it’s military tech doesn’t mean its not using pretty up to date technology there are plenty of military tech which is far more advance than anything on the market. Saying it’s a pentium 4 is pretty absurd. If it’s taken them 1 year to break then it’s a insult to the Iranians
It is up to date, its just not as fast as what you have at home, the failure rate for standard processors is way to high for military use. Its the same reason why NASA’s Curiosity rover only has a single core 200MHz CPU and 256MB of RAM.
“this is bad for everyone who isn’t Iran”…
Really? Do you think everyone is stupid enough to buy this “Iran is Satan” propaganda campaign? Well think again because there are many people that, unlike you, have educated (not brainwashed) brains.
There is big difference in saying Iran threatens some corporate interests and that it threatens UK/EEU/USA/etc population.
I would say the idiot who designed this drone is at fault. The camera should engage only when the drone is disengaged. That way it could be flown to target and then released and the evidence collected would be only that target area.
The data then doesn’t require any form of encryption and if it falls in the hands of the enemy doesn’t give any indication of where the enemy is, or what kind of tech they have on the ground.
If I understand you correctly, are you suggesting that this drone was carried to its target by a larger aircraft? That doesn’t happen with this particular drone – it’s far too large. It takes off and lands as a manned aircraft would.
That said, it has separate pilot cameras and FLIR cameras, one for flying the aircraft and the other for gathering intelligence. The FLIR didn’t need to be switched on at the airfield, but they may have just been performing pre-flight or in-flight tests.