Did Spoofing Down Drone the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone?

[rifleshooter474]

Defense
Did Spoofing Down Drone?
December 16, 2011

Press reports speculate that GPS spoofing was used to get the RQ-170 Sentinel Drone to land in Iran. According to an Iranian engineer quoted in a Christian Science Monitor story, "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain." At that point, the drone relies on GPS signals to get home. By spoofing GPS, Iranian engineers were able to get the drone to "land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications."

"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving a detailed description of Iran's electronic ambush of the highly classified pilotless aircraft.

The Christian Science Monitor story says military experts and "a number of published papers on GPS spoofing" indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible: "Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, the story quotes former U.S. Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore as saying. He added that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”

"We have a project on hand that is one step ahead of jamming, meaning deception of the aggressive systems,” the Iranian engineer reportedly said, such that “we can define our own desired information for it so the path of the missile would change to our desired destination.”

The story further quotes from a 2003 Los Alamos research paper, "GPS Spoofing Countermeasures," by Jon S. Warner and Roger G. Johnston:

“A more pernicious attack involves feeding the GPS receiver fake GPS signals so that it believes it is located somewhere in space and time that it is not. In a sophisticated spoofing attack, the adversary would send a false signal reporting the moving target’s true position and then gradually walk the target to a false position.”

In September 2011, the U.S. Air Force awarded two $47 million contracts to BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman for development of a navigation warfare (NAVWAR) sensor to military GPS receivers on aircraft and missiles, and designed to maintain freedom of action under extreme GPS countermeasures.

Designed to replace traditional GPS elements in airborne GPS/INS systems the NAVWAR Sensor will reportedly be compatible with existing embedded GPS receivers, and offer 10 meter CEP location accuracy even under heavy jamming. In addition to providing consistent position, navigation and timing data, it will help protect secure Blue Force tracking networks and datalinks, both considered critical infrastructures susceptible to enemy electronic attacks.

Designed to operate in hostile electronic environment, the future receiver will also offer situational awareness acting as a signals intelligence sensor, enabling GPS jammer detection, characterization, geolocation, and reporting of GPS jammers. Networked NAVWAR sensors will also be able to exchange hostile jammer locations with other networked NAVWAR receivers, thus optimizing collective countermeasures against the threat. The system will integrate the multi-mode Y-Code, M-Code and C/A-code (YMCA) receiver to offer more advanced capabilities, compared with current military code anti-jam GPS receivers. It will possibly include advanced technologies such as inertial sensing, chip scale atomic clocks, anti-jam antenna electronics, direction finding and geolocation algorithms to achieve the high level of survivability the Air Force expects.

No mention is immediately evident of anti-spoofing capabilities in the new device under development.

[mappow]

According to an Iranian engineer quoted in a Christian Science Monitor story

Am I the only one that sees an ironry here?

Maybe the drone was supposed to be taken all along. Hard to believe they were no destruct timer/fail safe built into this high tech weapon. Had them on what I used to work on.