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LOLZ Hax!!


psydT0ne

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The network they use for the drones in the middle east is over a decade old, a lot of it is completely unencrypted, which is probally due to the cost of adding encryption to a low latency link a decade ago (remember, this is a military project, the space shuttle still uses 386's for instance, they can't just bung an i7 in there), and 10 years ago you would be unlikely to come up against a technically proficient opponent in the middle east. A shit network is better than no network at all.

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You would think that the government would think "Ahead" of time & the enemy. But, as history shows that the government is always behind on technology. Maybe because the US is cheap or don't spend enough money on technology.

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I swear they always say "Never under estimate your enemy"

Accept when it comes to the technology department who are just sitting back watching Youtube, when they could be upgrading sh1t.

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You would think that the government would think "Ahead" of time & the enemy. But, as history shows that the government is always behind on technology. Maybe because the US is cheap or don't spend enough money on technology.

It has more to do with attaining milspec ratings for kit, which is notoriously difficult. These rules have been relaxed, mainly because troops deployed to Iraq started to use off the shelf civilian kit address shortcomings in issued kit (some of the first combat robots were cheap RC cars they used to drive into potential IED's). The brass took notice and things are speeding up now.

Another issue is reliability, if your gaming rig has a hardware bug that every now and again makes your machine behave in an unexpected way, then its annoying. But if this happens in a $60M armed drone your using to target a house full of insurgents with (who happen to live next to a school), then this is the type of thing that will end careers and loose contracts.

When these UAV's were designed, they facing the dillema of encryption increasing the latency of the operator to the relative environment of the UAV, and the equipment and skills required to intercept the feeds just wasn't going to be accessible to the general public. 10 years later and the cell phones we buy are more powerful than the desktops we used to own. I know this has been addressed with later models of UAV's (the MQ-9's and RQ-170's) but models like the RQ-1/MQ-1 are nearly 15 years old. No one building the things could have thought that someone in Iraq would have the level of tech required without a major government purchase you could easily embargo. From a cost point view, it wasn't needed.

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It could still be on the side of the US, They see the video feed and notice that's it's above them, they run out and get gunned down. :P Also, there must be a delay, even a delay of 60 seconds would pretty much make it useless.

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I don't see why people are shocked its been like this for 20 years, the thing is now the cost of seeing whats about is about £50, with the price of a PCI card like the SkyStar 2, a used dish and a copy of whatever software you prefer. The Linux based satellite receivers like the Dreambox have some nice tools for them and have done for years.

One system needs to integrate with older and upcoming systems, adding encryption is just another level of complexity. It also adds additional overheads. The military runs on proven and tested hardware and software, its not running the latest i5, as a friend once said, "Skynet runs on EMP-hardened 386DX CPUs".

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So the encryption just needs to be changed. Maybe not so much the encryption constantly changing as the possibility and window of decrypting the signal changing..

*here's a theory I have had in my brain for some few months*

Linear (but looks random) encryption based on only private keys hashed against time. The private keys can be randomly generated by the laptop before each take off with a ttl wire that you just plug into the plane to send the private key (or keys) to initiate it, and the exact time of the laptop with maybe a 5ms window. Hell you could use an arduino for this, so if worse came to worse.. what? $30 added to the cost of the plane? ez and cheap fix :)

Sort of like bluetooth but different and harder to crack. *and bluetooth is hard and costly enough to get more than a few packets as per last year's hak5 vid w/the dude who is trying to get a system setup for it*

It doesn't have to be an encryption that is out now either. One could make their own encryption. I'm not saying it's that easy, but at the same time it's not that hard. If the military would use their own instructors/tech workers/etc. that are in the field instead of outsourcing as per teh gov. then it would *possibly* be different.

And really, it's probably a system in that plane that is more like a 286 rather than a 386, cause you really don't need that much speed for anything that it does. I am *almost certain* that most of the collected data is organized @ the ground as per the laptop that goes with the controls, the plane just obfuscates the signal in some encryption and sends it to the ground. as long as the bus supports the speed there is no need for real number crunching on the plane, though that does create an overhead on the signal itself.

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