Unmanned Systems: Security by Obscurity

This is almost incredible news, until you realize it has been part of the risk assessment of the system all along. Still, a very troubling reminder that our information infrastructure is also our major weakness, not only one of our major strengths.

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

Skygrabber is software often used in the United States to steal satellite TV signals, among other things. It is relatively easy to use, and the commercial sector has dealt with this type of problem in many ways in the past. It is never inexpensive though. The article goes on.

In the summer 2009 incident, the military found "days and days and hours and hours of proof" that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. "It is part of their kit now."

A senior defense official said that James Clapper, the Pentagon's intelligence chief, assessed the Iraq intercepts at the direction of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and concluded they represented a shortcoming to the security of the drone network.

"There did appear to be a vulnerability," the defense official said. "There's been no harm done to troops or missions compromised as a result of it, but there's an issue that we can take care of and we're doing so."

But here is the key part:

The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn't know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Ahh, the heart of the problem... the Pentagon assumed Security through Obscurity. I have been pounding sand on the blog about the DoDs information infrastructure being a significant problem (particularly for the Navy's plans of the future), and I have a feeling I will no longer be one of the few voices. How many network systems are based on a such a false sense of security? As the Navy in particular relies almost exclusively on satellite based communications, this could be a bigger problem than people know.

The thing is, a bit more advanced bit of software like this would allow one to do a lot more than watch video feeds when tied into a network, for example, allowing one to track back to the source of the feed, otherwise known as location identification of the unmanned platform. Encryption won't solve that problem, and neither will radar coatings and stealth design.

Anyone else see why manned systems aren't going away anytime soon? We are decades from autonomous systems, and unless we can significantly increase the amount of bandwidth in our orbital communication networks (or learn how to integrate advanced routing into our DoD networks so we can develop more advanced information transport protocols), our potential in military technology capabilities will continue hitting the barriers of our information infrastructure.

The fix to this problem is going to be expensive. The DoD needs to rethink their information network infrastructure before throwing good money after bad. It would be a mistake to treat this problem like a patch solution when it should be a siren its time to upgrade.