[upchuck]

Need a hack-proof GPS pronto.

[Uri’el-2012]

What jackwad in the Pentagon allowed Micro$oft
to bid on this Top Secret system ?

[Sacajaweau]

Of course GPS would be the weakest point but I'm sure these stealths are viewed in real time....someone took a coffee break??

Best bet....Obama forget to issue a "destroy" call.

[ItsForTheChildren]

What are the chances they would have tried this if GWB was still in office?

[Bobalu]

None of this rings true at all.

Even a novice design team would build in at least triple layer watchdog systems.
There is no way a simple loss of GPS would cause all the systems to fail. Furthermore,
corruption of one system by trojan or virus would not take out the other watchdog
systems. These systems are kept isolated from each other by code base and power supply
and in some instances they have different design teams to ensure against sabotage.

Any one of the redundant systems would either result in the drone returning to friendly
airspace or the destruction of the craft.

GPS is not the sole method of determining the crafts location. They can follow terrain
just as a cruise missile can by referencing mapping data. GPS can give a drone pinpoint
navigation but that is overkill, within a few hundred yards is sufficient and even the
old system of inertial guidance can handle that.

The notion that the craft sustained damage because the landing strip is not at the same
altitude as the real one somewhere in Afghanistan is absurd! A sophisticated drone does
not rely on GPS to determine height above a runway, such a task is child’s play for even
a low dollar radar altimeter system. A remote controled plane enthusiast could build such
a system for his toy planes.

You simply cannot jam the communications system of a drone from the ground! They have
a link to low orbit satellites and the antenna for this is atop the craft and shielded from
a signal located on the ground. A break of this link would also result in a countdown to
self destruct that could only be halted by an encrypted code sent back from the drones
control point.

There is much much more I could say, I will say that this whole story strikes me as ridiculous
in the extreme.

[bayouranger]

Sure..we're working on that now.

[Cringing Negativism Network]

It is sickening our so-called leaders have done nothing about this act of war.

That is an American plane.

It was attacked.

[TheBattman]

Hack-proof? Why? The danged digital control signal was/is UNENCRYPTED!

Of course - if anyone is surprised this happened, then they probably believe Santa Clause is alive and lives at the North Pole... Lets see:

1. spy drones fly with unencrypted transmission
2. Same-said assets have been constantly infected with keylogger spyware/trojan (someone explain how this happens... unless it is intentionally allowed...)
3. No automatic self destruct (called an “oversight” by the CIA... yea, right.
4. No automatic return-to-base function if communication is disrupted (though is quite doable and available) .

[Sprite518]

Find it interesting how Iran, who is just now getting around to nuclear technology (we have had since World War II), has the ability to hack one of our top drones?

They can barely build nuclear weapons and an old technology. However, they sure as heck can hack one of the most secure military drones in the world?

Quite remarkable...

[Yo-Yo]

Need a hack-proof GPS pronto.

The UAV already has a hack-proof GPS. It's called INS - Inertial navigation System.

Even the cheap GPS guided JDAMs we drop have a backup INS onboard.

[Patton@Bastogne]

.


This posted story-theory appears to be bogus ...


I discovered the following information at Free Republic last night (2011-12-17) that appears to factually based ...


Regards,

Patton-at-Bastogne, aerospace mechanical engineer, work included Inertial Navigation System (INS) for both the F-35 (JSF) and the PAC III (Patriot) system ...


=========================================


Tale of RQ-170 Hijack In Doubt as Told in Tehran


Purported Iranian engineering specialists have been taking liberties with the laws of physics in their descriptions of an electronic hijacking of the RQ-170 unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, say U.S. analyst.


Holes in the account start with the fact that it took days for the Iranians to discover the lost aircraft. In fact, intelligence officials at one point thought the Iranians might simply never stumble across the crash site because it was in such a remote and uninhabited part of northeastern Iran.


Electronic attack of the Sentinel is “certainly possible, but there’s no indication that they even knew it had crashed in Iran for some time,” says a veteran black-projects manager.


That scenario is validated by an aerospace industry ISR specialist, who agreed that “if they were not aware [of the Sentinel’s presence in Iran for days], then there is no reason to believe they had any semblance of control.”


And then there are technical issues that make a hijacking, as described by the Iranians, unlikely.


“Among the reasons to doubt the claim that GPS jamming had anything to do with the loss of the RQ-170 is a simple overlooked fact,” says a third U.S. analyst. “GPS is not the primary navigation sensor for the RQ-170 or for most other air vehicles. The vehicle gets its flight path orders from an inertial navigation system, which is essentially unjammable unless you want to monkey with the local gravitational field.


The GPS updates the INS and cancels its drift. So, even a full GPS blackout would simply cause the vehicle to be a bit less accurate,” he adds.


“If the GPS was ‘spoofed’ with a fake signal — and even JDAMs have anti-spoofing GPS receivers today, so that might be difficult — any abrupt change in the GPS reading would cause the Kalman filters in the GPS/INS to conclude that the GPS was malfunctioning and cut it out of the loop,” he says.


The continuing discussion of why the RQ-170 went down was renewed by a Christian Science Monitor interview with Iranian military technologists who say they were able to “cut off communications links” to the Sentinel using knowledge gathered from the inspection of at least three other U.S.-operated, non-stealthy, unmanned aerial systems (UAS).


The trick, they say, was to scramble the GPS coordinates that guided the aircraft to make it think it was landing at its home base in Afghanistan, and only imprecision in the altitude data caused the Sentinel to land with its wheels up.


The report went on to quote an Iranian engineer as saying the “electronic ambush” was accomplished “by putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”


www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3abca8e6e2-70ef-40a3-8c56-f83aa6fc7ade&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest


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[verity]

"... may have a serious..."

And the author may have genital warts.