[Scan-DC] Hacking drone video

[michael rumberg]

this is really disappointing.  

 

serveral years ago this same situation was noted on our list regarding surveillance feeds from Europe being publicly accessible.    At the time I worked for a senator on the Armed Services Cmte - I passed the info around and the feeds were quickly encrypted.

 

but apparently not.    

 

 

 

 
> Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:00:18 -0500
> From: die at dieconsulting.com
> To: charley.armstrong at me.com
> CC: scan-dc at mailman.qth.net
> Subject: Re: [Scan-DC] Hacking drone video
> 
> On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 11:32:33PM -0500, Charley Armstrong wrote:
> 
> > Not in this case, however. The intercepted video was downlinked from
> > the UAV to a ground terminal. The technology is similar to what law
> > enforcement helicopters can send to command posts, or what news
> > helicopters send to their stations. Except LE and some news
> > organizations tend to encrypt there stuff.
> 
> This is unclear from the published stories I have seen so
> far. 
> 
> Obviously the downlink from the drone to the ground station is a
> very logical target - in the past these links used by news organizations
> tended to be regular FM modulated video (like old analog satellite
> video), but more and more news folks are switching (because of 2 GHz
> spectrum reallocation and HD format newscasts) to an OFDM modulation
> related to DVB-T... usually carrying a standard MPEG-2 transport stream
> from a vanilla mux/encoder box. A few stations may encrypt their
> streams (probably to keep the competition from watching them) but the
> great majority are open.
> 
> Many drones probably used (and some may still use) vanilla FM
> video, pretty much the standard format for RF linked NTSC video except
> broadcast.
> 
> Awfully easy to intercept that, however, and I imagine the
> military has moved toward digital MPEG downlinks from drones that can be
> readily encrypted with either military grade or just open commercial
> ciphers like AES or triple DES. Encryption chips (or encryption logic
> inside other chips) is widely available now and AES is considered by
> the open crypto community to be essentially unbreakable at the moment
> unless there is a protocol or side channel attack possible. Brute force
> doesn't work as it now can with single DES, so if the key used is random
> and secure there isn't much chance anyone unauthorized is watching.
> 
> But the news accounts I have seen suggest that the bad guys were
> intercepting US military satellite backhauls on commercial satellites in
> IP TV format using a Russian program called Skygrabber to find the IP video
> stream in a mux carrying the video. Equipment to do this is widely available
> for watching satellite TV and recording programs... and very cheap.
> 
> Seems really surprising that THAT backhaul wasn't encrypted since
> it is very easy to do so... 
> 
 		 	   		  
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