As pointed out above a liquid, perhaps even a corrosive gas can be used to destroy the electronics and perhaps part of the plane structure without a explosive. And you may be able to just destroy the computer software, basically have a ‘format C:’ command which wipes everything.
I wonder how difficult it would be to reverse engineer if the ICs had no markings.
A hard drive can be forensically recovered from a formatting. Formatting doesn’t erase anything, it just marks the whole disk as available for writing. Even rewriting the drive with random numbers doesn’t completely wipe the disk. If we’re talking about everyday criminals who just want your credit card, then yes, just formatting your drive will work. Against national governments who want the data you need to physically destroy the disk. Of course, a computer on a spy plane should have everything encrypted 27 ways from Sunday, so even if the black hats have physical access to the disk they shouldn’t get anything out of it anyway.
Who is to say it was not capable of self destruction? They said it was lost and beyond control. No control means no remote control too. It crashed when it ran out of fuel.
Right, but even if it was outside control it could still have some destruct functionality under local control. Obviously, slamming into the ground when you run out of fuel is going to create most of your self-destruction.
The drone already carries missiles, right? Just tell the missiles to attack a target 0 meters from the launch point.
It’s entirely possible drones don’t actually contain any sensitive material, or at least no material that’s still sensitive after we’ve lost contact with that specific drone.
Here’s how I would do it:
Cameras, computers, and communications gear is consumer or, at best, professional grade stuff that is likely made in China or South Korea anyway. We lose that, we lose the money, sure, but Iran doesn’t learn anything new about our technology. This isn’t Vietnam; you don’t need high-tech cutting-edge equipment to take color video and radio it back home anymore, even if you use a satellite to do it. You mainly need what TV news mobile units have had for years now.
Encryption is done using standard public key algorithms. If they can break them in a month, good for them; the information they’re protecting is utterly stale and worthless a few hours after it’s been transmitted. They can look over the software and get nothing from it they couldn’t get from downloading the latest version of GPG.
The drone has two encryption keys: The public key of its specific command channel and the private key of its specific video transmission channel. If the drone is lost, both keypairs are marked as compromised and never re-used. If you don’t understand the idea of “public key cryptography”, you can look it up for yourself or ask me to explain it; my point is, we can easily generate ten times as many keypairs as we’ll ever use even if we blacken the sky above Iran with our little birdies.
So, what have I missed? What vital information is being leaked by one of my drones falling unharmed into enemy hands?
C4? Just get Mythbusters Adam and Jamie on the case…
They’d just use it as an opportunity for a gratuitous rocket sled test to demonstrate it wouldn’t just detonate on impact.
And they would be right to do so. Rocket sled tests are the business.
So not only is it not programmed to self destruct, but instead programmed to serve itself up on a platter. I’ve always assumed they have thermite on all the sensitive electronics but maybe not.:smack:
It’s a stealth drone, the airframe shape and skin, and details of engine design to mask the emissions are all confidential. And the sensors are not going to be consumer grade video cameras. Presumably the RQ-170 has various infrared, radar, lidar, antennas for monitoring cell and radio traffic etc etc.
There’s a whole industry devoted to reverse-engineering ICs. Having the marking on the package probably wouldn’t even help, since the interesting ICs would all be custom. Anyway, there are people who de-cap the chip, and then use electron microscopes, x-rays, focused ion beam probes and other esoteric gear to reveal the design layer-by-layer. If the technology is interesting enough, the only way to be sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to be sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands…
Didn’t you guys watch Nikita?
I wonder how necessary all that is. Trying to keep big secrets like that is, long-term, impossible; you rotate passwords for the same reason: After a while, you must assume the enemy knows everything you are not changing on a regular basis.
The wiki article indicates that experts believe that the RQ-170 does not contain any sensitive stealth design features or reconnaissance tech due to the likelyhood of loss over enemy territory (single engine design). The RQ-170 also does not carry any weapons, and would not likely be used for a mission over a sensitive defended target like Iran - the US have better and stealthier assets for such jobs. It sound like a UAV suffered a comms failure over western Afghanistan and wandered into Iran and crashed. No biggie.
Si
Read the same wiki page further down and claimed that the RQ-170 has previously been used over Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Of course the US would claim “no big deal” that they’ve got something better whether that was true or not.
I work on a drone program. Mine does have a self destruct, but the destruction is for the avionic memory, not the airframe. The intent is to deprive the enemy of knowledge of any intelligence gathered. The military doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the airframe, because you can buy it on the open commercial market.
You can’t buy an RQ-170 airframe, and although the Air Force acknowledged the existence of the RQ-170 in Feb 2010, they haven’t released any official images of it, or allowed them to be taken at close range.
All the other UAV’s listed here have photos.
http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=16001
To me that seems pretty suggestive that the actual exact shape of the airframe is still classified, the 3D mockups that people are making from the few real photos vary widely in the details of where the wings meet the body.
I never claimed to work the RQ-170 program. I was speaking to my aircraft.
The two biggies are the actual intel gathered, and the encryption key used. If a data link radio can be captured still under power, the key can be extracted. The radios are designed with extremely volatile memory so that a loss of power obliterates the key and the frequency plan.
Imaging data goes into a ruggedized hard drive. That can be recovered regardless of power condition.
ETA: Derleth, I’m discussing real life. Your hypothetical is reasonable, except for the public key encryption.