{"id":2722,"date":"2009-12-18T00:25:09","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T08:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=2722"},"modified":"2009-12-17T23:37:37","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T07:37:37","slug":"reports-uav-video-feeds-compromised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/18\/reports-uav-video-feeds-compromised\/","title":{"rendered":"Reports: UAV Video Feeds Compromised"},"content":{"rendered":"

While UAVs have the politically palatable aspect of not endangering a pilot, they are not the panacea that some seem to have come to believe they are.\u00a0 They break, they crash, and sometimes they even have to be shot down by the good guys<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now the Wall Street Journal reports<\/a> that UAV video feeds that provide intel to American forces are also available to the targets<\/em> of those feeds.\u00a0 US forces reportedly captured laptops with hours of supposedly classified UAV video.<\/p>\n

In an era in which people are derided for not securing their passwords or loading anti-virus software on their computer, it seems unconscionable that the US military didn’t take the “simple” step of encrypting the feeds.\u00a0 This has led to some interesting comments, including “are we really that stupid?” as well as speculation that the military is intentionally revealing this now as an information campaign against its adversaries.<\/p>\n

If this really is a flaw in a military combat system, it is not unforeseeable.\u00a0 The Predator<\/em>, and its big brother the\u00a0Reaper<\/em>,\u00a0were essentially acquired “off the shelf”<\/a> from a commercial vendor.\u00a0 The Predator’s\u00a0capabilities were considered so valuable that it was rapidly pushed into combat.\u00a0 It is possible–and even likely–that this security flaw was a known issue<\/a> that was judged an acceptable risk.\u00a0 It is not uncommon for encrypted data to require more bandwidth, and result in slower speeds<\/a>, than unsecure communications.\u00a0 As others have noted, a “fix” would likely require modifications at the point of transmission–that is, every single UAV would have to be opened up and upgraded, at a cost of time, money, and intel.<\/p>\n

This situation does reveal a weakness of UAVs, though.\u00a0 They must<\/em> be operated with streaming video.\u00a0 On the other hand, a pilot in a fighter can turn his video off and simply look out the window.\u00a0 No adversary yet has managed to intercept a pilot’s ocular transmissions to his brain.\u00a0 Maybe there’s hope for the fighter pilot<\/a> yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While UAVs have the politically palatable aspect of not endangering a pilot, they are not the panacea that some seem to have come to believe they are.\u00a0 They break, they crash, and sometimes they even have to be shot down by the good guys. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that UAV video feeds that provide intel to American forces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[13,52,2,53],"class_list":["post-2722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fighter-pilot","tag-aircraft","tag-iraq","tag-military","tag-uav"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}