Re: OT: The Truth About Predator Drones

You need an old Lincoln Continental as the baseline mobile carriage frame.

They are outlawed at demolition derbys. Perfect mobile railgun platform base.

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The fact that you're missing is that when the systems were being developed, they *HAD* encryption. The encryption on the downlink to the operator was lost due to a design change that allowed the system to have a capability it never had before, the ability to takeoff and land without a nearby pilot/operator.

DS

Tactical military links to a mobile destination are being specified as static civilian links. An error rate of 1 in 10 on a battle field is far from impossible. The military will simply have to live with losing half their bandwidth to the FEC. The links also suffer badly from block errors - a mixture of motor bike engines and frequency hopping jammers. No need to be paranoid, the jammers have operators who are out to get you.

Andrew swallow

Sure, you just fly on up to the satellite and change its design so that it handles a digital uplink rather than an analog one. I think NASA has a space shuttle you can borrow.

Sure, so long as there is decryption hardware on the other end. If the other end is designed to receive an unencrypted analog uplink, it is

*not* an easy task to substitute encrypted video that can pass over the existing system and still be reliably decrypted on the other end despite noise in the analog signal. In fact, as far as I know, it is still an unsolved problem and every solution to date has been compromised.

The system has an analog uplink and a digital downlink. The middle essentially cannot be modified because it's satellites. The only reasonable solution is to encrypt the video before the uplink, pass the encrypted video over the analog uplink, and hope that the digital downlink can still be reliably decrypted. If you think that's an easy task, explain what technology you would use to do it.

DS

I think that he did mean what he said, that EVEN cracking it in NON- real-time is also impossible. However, that's probably wrong. Someone told me that the time it takes to crack it might be down to about 40 years or so, nowadays.

That's what I meant, but whoever told you 40 years probably needs to do a little more work with crypto.

Unless the fundamental AES algorithm is cracked, a determination not yet made by the top cryptographers in the world, no one will be cracking 256-bit AES any time soon.

A attempted brute-force attack on 256-bit AES would border on insanity.

See the following link:

"Assuming that one could build a machine that could recover a DES key in a second (i.e., try 2^55 keys per second), then it would take that machine approximately 149 thousand-billion (149 trillion) years to crack a 128-bit AES key. To put that into perspective, the universe is believed to be less than 20 billion years old."

That's 128-bit AES. I leave it to the reader to figure out how long it would take to brute-force search on 256-bit AES.

Hint: It's greater than 149 trillion years. Add 30+ zeros.

Also note in the paragraph above that 2^55=3D36,028,797,018,963,968, so this is a conservative proposition. You're talking about a machine that can do 36 quadrillion decipherments per second. Having every computational device on the planet at one's disposal would help a little bit, but you're still talking about billions of trillions of quadrillions of...yada..the age of the universe.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

The reason not to be paranoid is because "the jammers" will not be able to "jam" tommorow's (today's) gear. Tommorrow's battle theaters will be fast, secure, and clean and consistent links.

Boeing and many others are currently working on such systems. You have not even been paying attention to some of the references made in this very thread.

Since the idiot that referenced it was more concerned with putting down the government, it is not surprising that you may have missed his reference since it was framed inside a slew of insults.

Anyway, it is common knowledge what IS used, AND what WILL be used, as well as the wish list for an entire, new constellation of satellites.

It is only some of what is online now, and what is coming online and what may come online...

_

The WOPR could do it, no problem, and it is old.

Bwuahahahahaha!

The point was really that even from an advanced FEC standpoint an input BER of 1 in 10 isn't practical to work with for the described application. Yielding half the bandwidth to FEC overhead is actually practical, and using R = 1/2 coding over satellite channels is quite common. Using something like an R = 1/6 capacity-approaching code to be able to handle such low input error rates is, I think, not practical.

So I think there's a lot of misinformation being thrown around this thread, but that's probably not surprising anybody.

--
Eric Jacobsen
Minister of Algorithms
Abineau Communications
http://www.abineau.com

: o

I was thinking the same thing.

If someone allows me to send 7 FEC bytes for every 1 byte of payload, I could get reliable transmission over a salted wet noodle.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Last I checked, such a channel is within the operating range of a rate

1/3 binary convolutional code...

Steve

n n

How do you calculate those times?

Let's see. Just optimistically assuming that we could try 2^64 keys per second, for simplicity, and that we have a 128-bit key, that would take 2^64 seconds, since there would be 2^128 possible keys of 128 bits, and (2^128 keys) / (2^64 keys/sec) =3D 2^(128-64) seconds =3D 2^64 seconds. There are 60*60*24*365.25 =3D 31.5576x10^6 seconds per year. If I "round that off" to 30x2^20 (=3D 31.45728x10^6), then it would take

2^64 seconds / (30x2^20 seconds/year) =3D (1/30) * ((2^64)/(2^20) =3D (2^44)/30 =3D (1/3)(2^43) years. I must have made a math error, because that's a lot longer than 149 trillion years. It looks more like the 256-bit crack-time that you gave.

However, I have almost no idea how many keys per second could be tried, by a large, well-financed, tech- and crypto-savvy adversary. That is the key (pun intended). But it looks like it would be a lot cheaper for them to just buy or steal the key.

Cheers,

Tom

have

Uhh...Boeing, if you have been reading the news, was Public Enemy #1 in all of this. The senate appropriates committees were so angry with being duped by them over a period of six years, that the military was forced to send Boeing a "show cause" letter, basically saying, "You need to give us a reason to continue giving you hundreds of millions of dollars because what you have 'given' us so far stinks." :

Essentially, over a period from 1999-2005, Boeing was milking the cow while everyone slept. When it came time to show, they had nothing, a perplexing phenomenon that exist unto this day.

The military also gave a significant portion of the JTRS $37 billion contract to another prime contractor, which incensed Boeing and normally would have resulted in a lawsuit by Boeing against the US Government, but in this case, Boeing was helpless to do anything, because they had already received the show cause letter, and an investigation would have exposed the other fraud/waste/and-or/abuse that they were already engaged in. So they watched helplessly as the other conctractor took the bacon.

wn

I must be the idiot that you are referring to. If your pseudonym is indicative of what your mother/father does for a living, it would not be surprising that you think that I am an idiot for critizing the military.

s

Wish lists are nice. There is no less than $1 billion in research annually being spent annually to find solutions to problems in computer networking:

That does not mean that the military-industrial complex will produce the solutions.

Let's face it: JTRS is a real program that has been really with us since 1999. That's 10 years. They have had plenty of funds from US Government to produce. There was and is sufficient interest. Sufficient media attention. All the essential ingredients that would make a company like Boeing/Honeywell/Thales/etc. highly motivated to produce..they are present. And here we are, 2009, and the most that any of these companies have produced can best be described as a traditional "ManPack" radio, where transceiver is under software control, something that really has little to do with solving the problems and does not really solve problem of networking the radios. Frankly, the people running JTRS need to have a long talk with the IEEE people who created Wi-Fi. This will clear the air, and force the JTRS people to realize just how deep in it they are.

- Hide quoted text -

About a year ago, I read between 1250 and 1300 pages of documentation on this program, because I could not believe what I was reading. In a nutshell, the biggest problem with JTRS is that making software- defined radio is ~not~ the same as making a computer network of packets. It took them 6 years and $11 billon to discover this, while IEEE 802.11 committee members have known for decades and could have told them in the very first meeting in 1999 while the senators/etc. where getting all giddy about digitizing old field radios.

Now that they realize their mistake - thinking that, just because waveform is under software control, everything will magically "talk" to each other in a glorified computer network - they are too proud to ask for help. If they were to simply go to IEEE 802.11 meetings, and say, "Hey guys...we have $5 billion to solve this problem we really screwed up. Can you help us salvage all the promises of fantastic radio network that we made...", one of first things that a Wi-Fi engineer will want to see:

1. The spectral bandwidth that they have available
2. The bit rates they have been promising people
3. Situational parameters (SINAD -
   formatting link

...and immediately conclude that the spectral bandwidth is horrifically out-of-line with the bit rates promised. [Perhaps this is the primary reason why JTRS refuses to talk to real experts in doing this kind of thing - the truth is too frightening]. Oddly, some people at the Pentagon and elsewhere, who have experienced using convential PDA's to communicate over Wi-Fi, have been asking a very basic question - "Why not use Wi-Fi?" This angers some in the JTRS's program because they view succumbing to Wi-Fi as personal failure. They generally invoke the argument that Wi-Fi is not secure, which is ridiculously misleading and irrelevant to the final architecture.

I am not the only one critical of JTRS and other programs. Here is what the US GAO had to say, after a thorough, multi-month review of JTRS:

"The JTRS program has encountered a number of problems, resulting in significant delays and cost increases. The proram is currently estimated to total about $37 billion.":

If you read this document, and skip through the euphemisms, you will see that it essentially says, "These guys did not think about what they were doing before they started doing it."

There are other peoeple, who have questioned the vision of JTRS and its associated program. Just go to Goole and look up "JTRS failure", and there are numerous criticisms especially from inside the military:

I was also told by a high-ranking official at the Pentagon who has been involved in this since the very beginning that, at present, in

2009, the program should not be taken seriously by small companies hoping to receive funding, whether they are able to provide capability or not. The prime contractors, very large corporations, have already been chosen [the same ones that you see in the "JTRS failure" hits above], and the outstanding solicitations have been fielded as a matter of procedure.

Note that there is nothing wrong with the highly-vague vision of JTRS: anything can communicate with anything else over highly dynamic world- wide network that especially includes mobile, secured, radios in the field. There are people the world over who will not disagree that this is a good idea.

The problem is that there is a huge gap between vagueness and specificity, and for the past 10 years, the prime contractors and DARPA have earned a D+ on the specifics, IMO

For those of you in sci.electronics.design and comp.dsp, for amusement, you might want to take a look at JTRS promised bit-rates, given the width and location of spectrum allocated to the military:

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Not against a sophisticated enemy such as a member of the G20.

Andrew Swallow

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Yes, the money is best spend trying other things. ;)

Assuming 2^64 crypto operations per second, 128-bit crack would take, in years:

2^64/2/amount-of-time-in-year.

You have to do / 2 on bit-width to eliminate half the key space. The right key will either be in upper-half of keyspace or the lower-half. If you check only lower-half, sometimes you will get lucky, sometimes not, so on average, you check half the keys.

Continuing...

2^64/2/60/60/25/365 =3D 292,471,208,677 years.

But this assumes 2^64 ops/second. NIST only claimed 2^55 ops per second. That's 9-bits slower, or 512 times slower, so to get their 149 trillion ops per second, we do:

292,471,208,677 * 512 =3D 149,745,258,842,898.

-Le Chaud Lapin-

That's funny, because all of the other PDFs I saw on the site you felt so important to show us a discrepancy form from, showed all the gear and all the links that ARE being accomplished in the program.

YOU are in the dark.

YOU are likely some chump that failed to get a contract. Everything is on time with the current schedule, and that schedule morphed ONLY because the requisites were increased dramatically from the initial concept.

You're a goddamned idiot. If Boeing was committing fraud, they would lose contracts. ALL of them.

No. I think that you are an idiot because of the insulting guesswork you inject into your claims about what others are doing in an industry that you are obviously angry about being excluded from.