The study entitled "The Requirements for Successful GPS Spoofing Attacks" explains how to trick the GPS sensors of a drone. What is most upsetting is that all the info is on the net since 17 October of the 2011.
This is a PDF file, it is basically a study for hackers. And it is, still today, the first result available on Google. The research explains how to "bombard" the drone with false GPS signals until it loses the ability to calculate the position. The study also describes countermeasures to prevent these attacks.
In the period between the publication of the study and the countermeasures introduced by the designers, any hackers could have exploited the acquired knowledge to exploit the vulnerabilities of the systems.
And as if that were not enough, at the end of the study still available today on the network, the drones that could be hit were listed: among these the MQ-9 Reaper and the RQ-170 Sentinel. Just a Sentinel, it would have been shot down by the Iranians on December 2011, XNUMX, although the White House has never confirmed the incident.
Two years later, Iran presented the images of its "Sentinel" to the world with the first flight in the 2014.
Beyond the veracity of the video and the drone, it appears evident that although difficult to perform, on the net there were procedures to take down the allied UAVs without firing a shot.
The Iranian Sentinel
On November 11th, Tehran would test a remotely piloted aircraft based on the American RQ-170 Sentinel drone technology shot down in Iranian territory in the 2011. Just a year earlier, Iranian state television showed images of a replica of the US drone 'RQ-170 Sentinel'.
We were able to reveal the secrets of the drone - said the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - the UAV will be of fundamental importance for our future reconnaissance missions. Now we will be able to start mass production of unmanned aircraft.
Since the 2011, Iran claims to have taken possession and managed to decode the secrets of the 'Sentinel', shot down in December of the same year after entering Iranian airspace from the eastern border with Afghanistan.
The United States initially declared that it had lost a drone near the Afghan border, only to confirm the killing of the 'Sentinel', during an espionage mission over an Iranian nuclear plant.
According to the United States, Iran would still not be able to reveal the 'Sentinel' technology, due to the security protocols included in the drones operating on hostile territory. But the 27 October of the 2013, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards presented in Russia an unmanned spy plane which - according to Teheran - would derive from a reengineering process of a US drone captured in the 2012.
According to the Iranian press, in December of the 2012 Tehran would have captured at least three unmanned 'ScanEagle' aircraft. The reengineering process would have taken place precisely by the captured UAVs.
But what is the truth? The US military has always denied having lost 'ScanEagle' over Iran. However, the Canadian media, citing official documents, confirmed the loss of a 'ScanEagle' in the Arabian Sea in 2012. Still by the Canadian Navy, however, they categorically denied that the lost drone had been recovered from Iran.
The 'ScanEagle' is a low-cost UAV, produced by a Boeing subsidiary. It weighs twenty kilograms, has a wingspan of 3,1 meters and can fly for 22 hours and eight minutes. Quite another story for the much larger and more sophisticated 'Rq-170 Sentinel', UAV used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
In September of the 2013, Tehran stated that it had completed the reengineering process from the Rq-170, announcing the sale to third parties of the acquired technology. How true there is in Iranian utterances, perhaps we will never know, but the United States is not fault-free.
Indeed, Iran has considerable experience in the field of reengineering, much of which is provided by the United States in the period in which relations between Tehran and Washington were excellent. Since then, Iran has been able to buy spare parts for most of its American hardware and has had to resort to re-engineering to keep it running.
Franco Iacch
(photo below USMC)
