Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • November 8, 2021 8:35 AM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Since you once invented the “ass bomb” a little thought for you.

You can get comercial drones that can lift 5kg of mass, for a couple of thousand dollars.

What do you know about the M72 LAWS 66mm anti tank rocket launcher?

It weighs about half that weight, and has a range of 200meters and if close up will make a hole in bullet proof glass and armour plate. They can be purchased on the black market for a very small sum of money.

The thing is that, if you are running a “suicide drone” anyway, you can attach a rocket launcher and the drone will probably hold together long enough for the rocket to have cleared it…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M72_LAW

Any one want to take a guess on how long before someone makes something along those lines?

Clive Robinson • November 8, 2021 4:44 PM

@ echo,

As happens often I feel too many people are trying to sound clever and have the wrong focus.

To quote an old saying,

“One man’s meat is another man’s poison”.

As I keep saying,

“Technology does not solve societal issues”.

And the big problem we currently have that I hope none here have missed,

“Individual Rights-v-Sociatal Responsabilities”

But the genie is out of the bottle as far as drones are concerned, the likes of the US have sent their big brother UAV’s in with hellfire missiles and killed many innocent people for no reason other thanfrom the US President down the chain of command they were either stupid or did not care what the results were going to be.

Part of that “dividend” is we don’t have to give people ideas, they have already had them. All we are starting to see is the game of “catch-up” and technology has made it cheap oh so cheap…

Back when 9/11 happened, I pointed out that those that had flown the aircraft had done nothing more than,

“Take US technology and turn it around and make weapons out of it”

The same is happening two decades on with drone technology, and as with turning passenger aircraft into guided missiles there is very little that can be done to stop it, the gebie is out the bottle, and it’s not going back.

It’s foolish to think if we don’t talk about it, it won’t happen, because well a hellfire from a US UAV directed at a mobile phone is a fairly powerfull message that the MSM foolishly agrandised ove the past decade or so.

The US used a drone to kill an Iranian Diplomat on a peace mission in Iraq…

Now the Iraq Primeminister gets attacked in his own home by a drone alegedly by Iranian backed political parties…

Some might say “What do you think was going to happen?”.

Me I fully expect it to continue and get worse a lot worse…

Like others I expected RC Planes for the past couple of years, not quad-copters. You can build an RC Plane at home with a 30lb (14Kg) payload with little dificulty, you could also fly it up to 10,000ft (~2miles high) and bring it down on a near vertical balistic path which no radio jamming or the like would stop it reaching it’s target…

The Tamil Tigers started to investigate this back in 2007-9 along with their own little airforce (Air Tigers)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Tigers

Clive Robinson • November 10, 2021 4:37 AM

@ Winter,

Caesar build his political career and imperatorship on debt and corruption.

What was that sating about the turning of the wheel of history,

“The more things change, the more they stay the same”…

I guess proving the point in a way of why hierarchies can be not the actual “root of all evil”, but the soil in which it grows and enriches it.

Clive Robinson • November 10, 2021 8:16 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

The others are the linked swarm-drones where they cross-coordinate and cross-reference each other for massed attacks.

I came across this idea some years back when I was looking into what some would call “smart dust surveillance nets” these days[1].

Ross Anderson from Cambridge labs did some interesting work on the bit that I’m most interested in which is secure ad-hoc / self organising / mesh networks in what is ostensibly a hostile operating environment. One such paper that although more than a decade and a half old is becoming highly relevant today,

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/Papers/key-infection.pdf

[1] If you want to see something scary “pico-sats” these are about the size of a “coin cell” battery and about four times as thick.

All they effectively are are two solar cells a rechargable coin cell battery and a PCB which contains not just power/battery managment, CPU, sensors and a VHF or UHF transmitter and receiver that can communicate not just with other pico-sats but to Earth based stations and larger satellites in higher orbit…

The use of modern MEMS sensors make these little beasties decidedly scary.

Clive Robinson • November 11, 2021 4:02 AM

@ echo,

This is a rigged forum. Clive isn’t right about everything nor does he deserve the credit for everything. He’s just getting a free pass because he’s the Phantom Deleter’s favourite.

A free pass… Then why did one of my posts get deleted just yesterday?

I haven’t said a single thing which isn’t backed by policy or research yet that goes walkies.

Funny thing I was kind of thinking that as well about my post. It was pointing out an article in the British Medical Journal(BMJ), the house journal of one of British Medical Association(BMA) and one of the most reputable journals there is for both policy and research. Unlike you I gave a link to the article so others could make their own judgment. But to use your vernacular “yet that goes walkies”, presumably by your “Phantom Deleter”…

So as it’s happened to other longterm posters as well, your accusation of “This is a rigged forum” sounds a little thin to be honest.

Perhaps it’s not who says, but what is said? Have you actually given that the consideration it is due”

Perhaps you should think about the notion of “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”… One thing that is not liked on this blog is “party politics” and similar, which you have a tendancy to decide is policy. To many it’s not the highly technical asspects of ICT security this blog was once talking about all the time. But times move and ICTsec due to the failings of it as an industry is not realy inovating, and many academic securiry papers are as I’ve noted “Cabbage re-boilers”.

Speaking of which much that you claim as original is not and you would know if you’d done any research by looking back on this blog, or in Cryptogram or other places.

A major failing of the ICTsec industry as I keep pointing out is,

“It does not learn even from it’s living history”

Which is what research “depth and breadth” is all about… and why I mention it a lot as well as calling “cabage re-boiling” what it is.

Something your “Clive isn’t right about everything nor does he deserve the credit for everything.” appears to be based on. As I said to you before “do your research present your findings in that light” if you indicate previous work it is considered good form and why papers have so many footnotes and citations, something mostly lacking in your postings.

But it’s not just research you appear to come up short in. Your understanding, reasoning, and even comprehension abilities with regards science can be quite alarming, especially when you say,

That’s a clear bias when Clive puts on a big act of “forensic analysis” on one had yet in other topics is slagging off forensics as magical thinking.

What I do is “analysis” plain and simple which is part of the scientific process. That is I take a set of information that is probative and I move it forward to indicate a possability, or make a hypothesis which because it IMPORTANTLY moves forward in time from “cause to effect, by testable methods” is open to anyone else to try and is stable in that it reduces to a provable conclusion.

Forensics does do this type of analysis and I’ve indicated that it does. However it also does the opposit which is try to go backwards in time from “effect to cause” that is neither stable or wise as it does not in any way come to A provable conclusion.

As an example of science,

If you take a quantaty of substance A that contains sodium atoms, and a quantuty of substance B that contains chlorine atoms and using a medium C apply methods M,N,O, and P you end up with a pure crystalline result of Sodium-Chloride or common salt.

The above is like a recipe for cooking a cake (and as I’ve said befor, eggs were our first standard measure and cooking our first scientific method and recipies the published papers, science came from the kitchen).

Now where forensics goes wrong is as follows,

I get given a crystaline substance, and I analyze it and find it is Sodium-Chloride. I know that it can be made by applying methods, M,N,O, and P to substances A,B, and C. I then write this in a report.

Do you see what is wrong with this?

Well even with A, B, and C, there are very many more methods than M,N,O, and P that will result in Sodium-Chloride crystals. Likewise there are way way more substances than A, B, and C. That is there are thousands of ways you can end up with crystalline Sodium-Chloride, probably more than any individual can have been told let alone recall and there may well yet be new ones to be discovered.

The report is not proof of anything other than questionable behaviour. It in no way meets the burden of proof of “beyond reasonable doubt”. Yet people go into courts all the time and do this. Look up convictions based on “pour patterns” where it was claimed that accelerants must have been used in fires, so it must be arson, so it must be a crime, so it must have been committed by some one. Guess what “Mr top of our list” it’s your unlucky day your going to jail”.

Then some one actually did some science, and showed that “pour patterns” were nothing of the sort, they were infact “puddling patterns” and happened when a solid subject to gravity became liquid and fell, then became vapour… Something that actually happens as part of any fire where say plastics are present, like as ceiling tiles, furniture, etc etc. They even happen with organic materials as well, even metals when they get hot enough melt and vapourize and leave behind puddling patterns.

So what happens to all those who went to jail due to “pour patterns” what do you say to the ones who finally get out? Or the relatives of those that have died in prison?

As an old saying has it “You can not unbake a cake”. Something you don’t appear to have got the hang of. Otherwise you could not have innocently made the statment you made.

Clive Robinson • November 13, 2021 10:09 PM

@ Bystander,

What is your point?

I made several.

But if you want me to reiterate one,

It’s that as normal, technology has moved at a greater pace, than those who think themselves in positions of power –legislators, guard labour, etc– have realised and are now fairly belatedly finding themselves to be in a reactive rather than proactive position.

In short, “The genie is out of the bottle and it has sharp teeth”.

A noisy commercial drone is probably not the best tool for recon and the said laser or GPS Jammer would ruin its day as well. ECM would probably be more efficient against it as well.

A friend runs a business using commercial drones, and they realy are not as noisy as other aerial platforms. If one is on the ground behind a wall and you are in an open top vehicle you certainly will not hear it. Once it’s above 150m it has to be a very quiet day to hear it even in the countryside. Using one to inspect tall power pylons and Wind farms did not cause any noticable effect on livestock beneath them.

As I’ve noted above ECM to be effective has to be “intelligence led”. Changing the frequencies to be well away from “the usual ones” drones work on is fairly trivial for even engineering undergraduates. Having designed jammers and similar for Close Protection work and bomb disposal systems, I know just how ineffective they realy are, and how they can actually be a serious liability. After all you don’t want a drone with TDOA capability flying down your jamming beam…

But a jammer or other active ECM only works if there is a control or guidence signal to be jammed in some way, which need not be the case. Mobile phone electronics that can do facial recognition have sufficient computing power to optically recognise a target and remain locked to it. Even a $1 microcontroller can lock to a target that is being “painted” by a $5 IR laser driven by a TV Remote Control handset[1]. A back facing set of photo detectors on the drone can be used to decode a low power IR laser signal that is being used to control the drone[2] and there is little the target in front of the drone could do about it “safely”.

I won’t go into the tedious details but you can build your own drone electronics without that much difficulty, the electronics is not that hard to reverse engineer from an existing drone. Also there is near compleate basic software you can find on the web. And if you look into MEMS you will find GPS is not necessary for actually flying and course setting.

So the “technology lead” is effectively over for Military and Law enforcment, and their adversaries have an asymmetric advantage. That is the difference being the Mil/LEA will keep having to pay a high price, whilst their adversaries can pay a fraction the price for sufficiently similar or capable systems.

Thus the effect of economic asymmetric advantage has added to other asymmetric advantages that small groups have these days when not on their home ground.

[1] Back last century during “The Troubles” some of the bomber cells started to use 27MHz Radio Control equipment to set off what we now call IED’s. So foot patroles were issued with jamming equipment for the RC frequencies. In response one of the bomber cells used a couple of cheep plastic telescopes a Light Dependent Resistor and a flash gun from a camera to set off a car bomb… That was a third of a century ago think gow far things have come since then[2].

[2] You can find plans on the Internet from Ham Radio designers for optical data links that using parts you can get from the likes of Digi-Key will work upto several miles even on a bright summers day.

High power LEDS are better than lasers for a number of reasons,

http://www.modulatedlight.org/optical_comms/optical_about.html

I know one Ham who actually designs both LED and Laser optical systems and microwave links up above 70GHz for the “higher bands”, and chases record path lengths.