2013-02-07

Iranian drone expertise somewhat overblown

I read the drone re-engineering claims of Iran with some amusement. There's plenty of blame to lay at the door of RQ-170 manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, but the Iranian claims that the drone capture has been a springboard for their own drone program seem somewhat overblown.

Why is it overblown?

Last year Iran said it was building a copy of the drone - an RQ-170 Sentinel - after breaking its encryption codes.
Let's assume it has the manufacturing capacity to reproduce the airframe and materials sufficiently exactly. How does it reproduce the electronic hardware which is a mission-critical component to the drone, controlling its flight and comms? Has it managed to reproduce the ASICs (custom chips) on the PCBs? If so, how? Has it constructed its own silicon fab facilities capable of producing sub-100-nm circuits? That's going to set them back a good few $bn, even if they buy the expertise lock, stock and barrel from Intel or other fab owners. Given that it obtained the drone back in 2011, how did it set all this up, manufacture all the components, integrate them and test the systems within 2 years? If they can do this, the UK MOD and US DoD should totally farm out military systems development to Iran as they're doing it in a quarter of the normal time.

What wouldn't surprise me: the drone storing unencrypted video data on its own storage media. Presumably a functional requirement is for the drone to be able to retransmit telemetry or video after a comms outage, so it will have to store data as it's produced; since comms outages can be open-ended, the easiest solution is to write all data to disk since disks are cheap and drones have plenty of payload space. Encrypting all stored data doesn't buy you too much; either the drone uses symmetric encryption - and thus the encrypt key stored in the drone in persistent storage is the same as the decrypt key - or it uses asymmetric encryption, complicating the drone's initial programming and likely increasing CPU usage. I'm sure someone did a risk assessment at some point and said "heck, the enemy can fly its own drone above its territory and get the same data, it probably tracks our drone on radar or infra-red, what does it matter if it knows where our drone flew and what it saw?"

Nevertheless, I expect the Pentagon to be conducting a rapid re-assessment of the benefits of asymmetric-encrypted data storage on remote platforms.

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