Was US Spy Drone Captured by Iranian Flying Saucer?

[joboo]

Has anybody noticed that the drone is in perfect condition. No apparent damage. I call bullshit..

There is a distinct possibility that if you jam the GPS uplink it could go into autopilot, and land. If you spoof the GPS coordinates, there is also the possibility you can trick it into landing.

As a designer what would you do, have it intentionally crash upon losing all communication signals (i.e. long term), or have it auto land with hopes of recovering it?

There are also considerations on how early of a model it was, and what the mission was.

The knowns are: drones are being used absolutely everywhere like potato chips. Iran is the primary target like a bad case of blueballs. How often does the military fuck up?

Those three elements alone make it highly likely to be genuine.

[vacuum]

I've got two big problems with this whole thing. First, I find the idea that they somehow hacked into it and landed it to be pretty much impossible. The encryption is way too strong, and even if they were able to break it, they don't have the client which controls it. They wouldn't know what sequence of commands to give it.

The other thing is that I find it hard to believe that this drone relies only on gps for navigation. More likely it uses a combination of gps, military satellites, terrain pattern recognition (it has a database with topo maps of the whole region, and it can fingerprint where it is from photos), and also gyroscopes and kinematic calculations. Even if it did rely only on gps, it would surely detect it's gps signal being jammed.

[joboo]

I've got two big problems with this whole thing. First, I find the idea that they somehow hacked into it and landed it to be pretty much impossible. The encryption is way too strong, and even if they were able to break it, they don't have the client which controls it. They wouldn't know what sequence of commands to give it.

The other thing is that I find it hard to believe that this drone relies only on gps for navigation. More likely it uses a combination of gps, military satellites, terrain pattern recognition (it has a database with topo maps of the whole region, and it can fingerprint where it is from photos), and also gyroscopes and kinematic calculations. Even if it did rely only on gps, it would surely detect it's gps signal being jammed.

I suppose it would depend on how early, or not, of a prototype this thing is as to whether or not it has a topo database programmed in with real time AI.

When it's jammed, the thing is blind from every angle with no navigation capabilities aside from fly straight to unknown point x, turn left or right to unknown point y, or land.

If you're patrolling a border location not being able to control direction at all times could start a war as the thing crosses borders, and flies god knows where. At that point should it crash to the ground potentially exploding something, or try to land asap?

Another thing to consider is topographical maps only provide so much navigation abilities, or margin of error so to speak, at certain resolutions i.e. altitudes.

[DMac]

yesterday they announced how they did it. they scrambled the onboard gps signal and then hacked in to it and changed it's computer to think it's homebase was an iranian airfield.

bingo.

In order to do so, it is speculated they found a way to hack RSA.

http://cryptome.org/0005/iran-rsa-cipher.htm

This is kind of a big deal if so.

If they really did spoof GPS to misdirect the drone they would have had to have broken red-key mode M-code GPS, which is the military GPS signal used in classified hardware (black-key mode is used in unclassified hardware).

This would mean the Russian help angle is misdirection.

Edit to add:
ComodoHacker claimed to break RSA in the past. It is not impregnable.