Pentagon Looks to Fix ‘Pervasive Vulnerability’ in Drones

BY NOAH SHACHTMAN

Drones may be at the center of the U.S. campaign to take out extremists around the globe. But there’s a “pervasive vulnerability” in the robotic aircraft, according to the Pentagon’s premier science and technology division — a weakness the drones share with just about every car, medical device and power plant on the planet.

The control algorithms for these crucial machines are written in a fundamentally insecure manner, says Dr.Kathleen Fisher, a Tufts University computer scientist and a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. There’s simply no systematic way for programmers to check for vulnerabilities as they put together the software that runs our drones, our trucks or our pacemakers.

In our homes and our offices, this weakness is only a medium-sized deal: developers can release a patched version of Safari or Microsoft Word whenever they find a hole; anti-virus and intrusion-detection systems can handle many other threats. But updating the control software on a drone means practically re-certifying the entire aircraft. And those security programs often introduce all sorts of new vulnerabilities. “The traditional approaches to security won’t work,” Fisher tells Danger Room.

Fisher is spearheading a far-flung, $60 million, four-year effort to try to develop a new, secure way of coding — and then run that software on a series of drones and ground robots. It’s called High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS.

Drones and other important systems were once considered relatively safe from hack attacks. (They weren’t directly connected to the internet, after all.) But that was before viruses started infecting drone cockpits; before the robotic planes began leaking their classified video streams; before malware ordered nuclear centrifuges to self-destruct; before hackers figured out how to remotely access pacemakers and insulin pumps; and before academics figured out how to hijack a car without ever touching the vehicle.

“Many of these systems share a common structure: They have an insecure cyber perimeter, constructed from standard software components, surrounding control systems designed for safety but not for security,” Fisher told a group of researchers earlier this year.

It’d be great if someone could simply write some sort of universal software checker that sniffs out any program’s potential flaws. One small problem: Such a checker can’t exist. As the computer science pioneer Alan Turing showed in 1936, it’s impossible to write a program that can tell if another will run forever, given a particular input. That’s asking the checker to make a logical contradiction: Stop if you’re supposed to run for eternity.

Fisher became fascinated by this so-called “Halting Problem” as soon as she heard about it, in an introduction to programming class at Stanford. “The fact that you can prove something is impossible is such an amazing thing that I wanted to learn more about that domain. That’s actually why I became a computer scientist,” she says. The instructor for the class was a guy named Steve Fisher. She was interested enough in him that she wound up marrying him after school, and taking his last name.

But while a universal checker is impossible, verifying that a particular program will always work as promised is merely an exceedingly-freakin’-difficult task. One group of researchers in Australia, for example, checked the core of their “microkernel” — the heart of an operating system. It took about 11 person-years to verify the 8,000 lines of code. Fisher is funding researchers at MIT and Yale who hope to speed that process up, as part of one of HACMS’ five research pushes.

Once the software is proven to work as advertised, it’ll be loaded onto a number of vehicles: Rockwell Collins will supply the drones – namely, small, robotic Arducopters; Boeing will provide a helicopter; Black-I-Robotics will supply a robotic ground vehicle; another firm will provide an SUV.

In another phase of the program, Fisher is bankrolling research into software that can write near-flawless code on its own. The idea is to give the software synthesizer a set of instructions about what a particular program is supposed to do, and then let it come up with the best code for that purpose. Software that writes more software may sound crazy, Fisher says. But Darpa actually has some history of doing it.

“There was a project led here at Darpa a few years ago [to write software for] synthetic aperture radar. They had a non-expert specify [what should go into a synthetic aperture] radar program,” Fisher adds. “It took the system about 24 hours to produce an implementation…instead of three months [for the traditional version] and it ran twice as fast. So — better, faster and a lower level of expertise. We hope to see things like that.”

You couldn’t ask a program to write the equivalent of PowerPoint — it does too many different things. “By the time you’ve finished the specifications, you might as well have written the implementation,” Fisher says. But the software that controls drones and the like? Ironically, that’s way more straight-forward. ”The control theory about how you do things with brakes and steering wheels, how you take sensor input and convert it to actions is described by very concise laws of mathematics.” So synthesized (and secure) software should be possible to produce.

The goal at the end of HACMS is to have the robotic Arducopter running only fully verified or synthesized software. (The other vehicles will have some, but not all, of their “security-critical code” produced this way, Fisher promises.)  And if the project works out as Fisher hopes, it could not only help secure today’s largely remote-controlled drones. It could make tomorrow’s drones fly on their own — without being hacked.

In the remaining component of HACMS, researchers from Galois, Inc. will work on a fully-verified, hack-proof software monitor that can watch a drone’s autonomous systems. If those systems operate the robotic aircraft in a normal fashion, the monitor will sit back and do nothing. But if the drone suddenly starts flying itself in some weird way, the monitor will take over, perhaps passing control back to a flesh-and-blood operator.

In other words, a drone won’t just be protected from an outside attacker. It’ll be protected from itself.

Watch Darpa’s Headless Robotic Mule Respond to Voice Commands

• BY SPENCER ACKERMAN for WIRED

If robots are ever really going to carry the bags of U.S. soldiers and marines, the Pentagon’s futurists think, they’re going to have to act more like pack animals. That means responding to voice commands, figuring out when it makes sense to follow a human being and when it doesn’t, and getting around uneven terrain and other obstacles. Darpa thinks it’s off to a good start.

Over the past two weeks, the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers took an upgraded LS3 robot — a cousin of the headless BigDog and PETMAN made by Boston Dynamics — on a walk through the woods and hills of Fort Pickett, Virginia. (LS3 = “Legged Squad Support System,” get it?) It was the first test conducted on the LS3 after bolstering the autonomy functions for the $54 million project, now in its fifth year. As the video above shows, when a human instructor calls out “engine on” and “follow tight,” the robot’s engine activates, and it follows its master on exactly the path the human takes. When the human calls out “follow corridor,” the robot will “generate the path that’s most efficient for itself,” explains Army Lt. Col. Joseph Hitt, Darpa’s LS3 program manager.

Darpa figures that it’s illogical to make a soldier hand over her rucksack to a robotic beast of burden if she’s then got to be preoccupied with “joysticks and computer screens” to guide it forward. “That adds to the cognitive burden of the soldier,” Hitt explains. “We need to make sure that the robot also is smart, like a trained animal.” So the LS3 uses a laser range-finder, specialized cameras and stereo vision to keep track of its human master.

Darpa is really literal when it means that the LS3 has to operate like a mule. It needs to haul up to 400 pounds, walk 20 miles and operate for 24 hours without human intervention. The program’s been undergoing tests for years, and Darpa and Boston Dynamics have put out numerous videos showing the gangly metal beast climbing woodlands, recovering from being kicked over and running on treadmills. The Fort Pickett tests show much of the same. Only this time, the robot is way quieter — emitting “less noise than any combustion-engine system out there that’s tactically relevant,” Hill says — and its rounded back and spindly legs allow it to climb out of the uneven terrain that troops in, say, Afghanistan encounter. The LS3 can now also put its feet on uneven surfaces like logs, whereas before it labored to avoid them.

All this is the result of major advances to the LS3′s software, particular as it integrates with the system’s sensors. At Fort Pickett, it walked through an obstacle course of shipping containers that subbed for the narrow alleyways of urban conditions. That showed the LS3 computing a course on its own: “The robot has to decide, ‘Can I fit here 20, 30 meters from now, or do I have to turn around?’” Hitt says. (Skip to 1:40 on the video to see what the robot sees.)

So far, the system responds to ten basic voice commands — again, like a trained animal — like “stop,” “follow tight,” or “engine off.” But “perception and platform robustness” remain challenges, Hitt concedes, like ensuring the robot can react to changes in light or weather. It can’t, for instance, look at a snow-covered hill and figure out if the snow is too deep to traverse. Nor can it avoid battlefield dangers like gunfire or bombs. “We’ll have to always continue to add additional logic,” Hitt says.

That’s what’s going to happen over the next two years. Every three months, Darpa will take the LS3 to a different set of climate conditions that U.S. troops have to encounter; first up is the arid, desert environment of the Marines’ Twentynine Palms base in California’s Mojave Desert. That’s an indicator of Darpa’s desire to hand over its first robot to a Marine company in 2014. The LS3 may not have a head, but Darpa expects it to be at least as smart as a real-life mule.

Spy Drones Over America: Lawmakers Demand Answers On Privacy Safeguards

April 20, 2012

 

A bipartisan pair of Congressmen joined forces Thursday to put important questions to the Federal Aviation Administration regarding the agency’s plans to open up American skies to thousands of surveillance drones.

Reps. Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) penned a letter to the FAA demanding answers on how the federal agency will protect the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens if and when the use of unmanned ariel vehicles by government, law enforcement and private companies increases.

“There is…potential for drone technology to enable invasive and pervasive surveillance without adequate privacy protections.” the Congressmen’s letter stated.

“We are writing to express our concerns about the law’s potential privacy implications and to requisition information about how the FAA is addressing these important matters.” it continued.

Congress recently passed legislation paving the way for what the FAA predicts will be somewhere in the region of 30,000 drones in operation in US skies by 2020.

Once signed by president Obama, the FAA Reauthorization Act allows for the FAA to permit the use of drones and develop regulations for testing and licensing by 2015.

• “Many drones are designed to carry surveillance equipment, including video cameras, infrared thermal imagers, radar and wireless network ‘sniffers,’ ” the representatives wrote.

They added that the FAA has “the responsibility to ensure that the privacy of individuals is protected and that the public is fully informed about who is using drones in public airspace and why.”

Barton and Markey are acting in their roles as co-chairmen of the Congressional Privacy Caucus.

“We must ensure that as drones take flight in domestic airspace, they don’t take off without privacy protections for those along their flight path,” Markey said. “The potential for invasive surveillance of daily activities with drone technology is high. Standards for informing the public and ensuring safeguards must be put in place now to protect individual privacy.”

“When the domestic use of drones was legalized in the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, I knew that the usage of these unmanned aircraft would bring a great benefit to our local and state governments, as well as some businesses,” Barton added. “However, if used improperly or unethically, drones could endanger privacy and I want to make sure that risk is taken into consideration.”

The FAA declined to comment on the lawmakers’ letter, however the agency has today released information regarding where drones are currently being flown and who is flying them.

The documents were released to the privacy watchdog The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) after the group sued the agency for initially not responding to a Freedom of Information Act request in January.

The FAA documents show which private companies and government entities currently have a certificate to fly drones in US airspace.

They include Raytheon, General Atomics, Telford Aviation, AAI Corp, Honeywell, Unmanned Systems Inc, L-3, and Aurora Flight Companies, as well as government agencies DARPA, the FBI, the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, & Homeland Security, and branches of the military.

As we reported in February, Over 30 prominent watchdog groups have banded together to petition the FAA on the proposed increase in the use of drones. The groups, including The American Civil Liberties Union, The Electronic Privacy Information Center and The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, are demanding that the FAA hold a rulemaking session to consider the privacy and safety threats.

The ACLU noted that the FAA’s legislation “would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected.”

In addition to privacy concerns, the groups warned that the ability to link facial recognition technology to surveillance drones and patch the information through to active government databases would “increase the First Amendment risks for would be political dissidents.”

Steve Watson Infowars.com

Government Documents Prove Domestic Drones Are For Spying On Americans

Aug 21, 2012

 

A data dump of government documents secured via the Freedom of Information Act shows that the roll out of domestic unmanned drones will, for the most part, be focused solely on the mass surveillance of the American people.

The documents, from the Federal Aviation Administration, were recently made public by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Among the documents are never-before-released Special Airworthiness Certificates (SACs) detailing which private companieshave been granted permission to operate drones in US skies.

The EFF notes that the vast majority of drones are being used purely for surveillance purposes:

With some exceptions, drone flights in the U.S. have been all about developing and testing surveillance technology.  TheNorth Little Rock Police Department, for instance, wrote that their SR30 helicopter-type drone “can carry day zoom cameras, infrared cameras, or both simultaneously.”

Not to be outdone, the Seattle Police Department’s drone comes with four separate cameras, offering thermal infrared video, low light “dusk-dawn” video, and a 1080p HD video camera attachment.

The Miami-Dade Police Department and Texas Department of Public Safety have employed drones capable of both daytime and nighttime video cameras, and according to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Certificate of Authorization (COA) paperwork, their drone was to be employed in support of “critical law enforcement operations.”

However, the FAA didn’t just rubber stamp all drone requests. For example, the Ogden Police Departmentwanted to use its “nocturnal surveillance airship [aka blimp] . . . for law enforcement surveillance of high crime areas of Ogden City.” The FAA disapproved the request, finding Odgen’s proposed use “presents an unacceptable high risk to the National Airspace System (NAS).”

The unmanned aerial vehicle industry has attempted to lobby the government using all kind of platforms, suggesting that drones can be used for monitoring environmental changes or the effects of natural disasters.

However, the FAA documents conclusively show, if there was any doubt before, that monitoring the activities of everyday Americans is the number one priority.

As we reported last week, thousands more pages of FAA experimental drone flight records that were obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) detail just how complicated and risky it would be to operate thousands of unmanned arial vehicles safely without spending billions of dollars.

Manufacturers of drones, almost exclusively defense contractors, have spent $2.3 million so far on lobbying Congress to open up US airspace.

Steve Watson Infowars.com

New Documents Show Military Is Flying Drones Throughout US

DARPA flying Reaper drones that surveil entire cities in real time

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Dec 6, 2012

 

Thousands of pages of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) documents released under the Freedom Of Information Act highlight that the military is extensively flying surveillance drones in non-restricted skies throughout the country.

The records, released by The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), reveal that three branches of the military are operating drones within civillian airspace. Those branches are the Air Force, the Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

According to EFF, the documents show that the Air Force is testing all manner of UAVs, from small hand launched drones all the way up to the Predator and Reaper drones, the kind that routinely conduct missile strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

EFF notes that the use of drones capable of extensive surveillance in public airspace is concerning, especially since recent reports have revealed that Air Force drone operators have been conducting practice spying missions by tracking civilian cars along highways adjacent to military bases.

In addition, a recently uncovered Air Force document also raised alarms over military use of spy drones in US skies. The document outlines how to circumvent privacy laws, and clears the way for the Pentagon to use drones to monitor the activities of Americans.

EFF notes that the latest FAA documents indicate that the Marine Corps is also flying drones in US skies, but that “it chose to redact so much of the text from its records that we still don’t know much about its programs.”

Perhaps most disturbingly, DARPA, according to the documents, is flying full sized Reaper drones in areas of Nevada, California and Utah that are able to use technology that can capture motion imagery of entire cities. The technology, known as “Gorgon Stare” uses an array of nine to twelve cameras attached to the drone to take concurrent footage from multiple different angles.

Feeds from those drones can be fed into artificial-intelligence software developed by DARPA known as the“Mind’s Eye project”, which can analyze all the data at once, meaning that essentially a machine can keep watch over everything happening in an entire city.

Once again, this is being used INSIDE the US, by the military, in public airspace.

More advanced programs are being built by DARPA that could soon incorporate hundreds of cameras on a drone.

As we previously reported, the FAA has been working extensively with the military and the government in the ongoing mass expansion of the use of drones in US skies.

This summer it was revealed that the FAA has officially established eight blocks of restricted airspace in North Dakota, in order that the Air National Guard can fly unmanned Predator aircraft and have them aim lasers at ground targets. The airspace will be from 500 to 9,999 feet above sea level and commercial aircraft will be prohibited from using it.

Despite widespread objections from local pilots and concerned citizens, officials have indicated that North Dakota could become the nation’s centre for all military drone training activity, owing to its relatively sparsely-populated skies.

The Department of Defense has been less than forthcoming with information on its use of drones over the US.

Indeed, the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), part of the DoD, recently denied operating surveillance drones in two different states, issuing statements that have since been proven to be completely false.

Headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, USSOCOM is the Unified Combatant Command charged with overseeing the various Special Operations Commands of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

As reported by the open information advocacy group Public Intelligence:

Following our publication of a map of current and proposed Department of Defense drone activities within the U.S., several journalists with local publications around the country wrote articles regarding drone activities that were listed in their area.  David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph wrote about the listing of New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington as the site of a USSOCOM drone activity involving small unmanned aerial vehicles including the Raven and Wasp.  Corey Pein of the Willamette Week wrote about a planned USSOCOM drone activity in Portland that was listed as utilizing the same types of drones.

Public Intelligence notes that when the reporters contacted USSOCOM for clarification and further details, they were told that the information on the map was inaccurate and that USSOCOM does not operate drone bases in either area.

However, further investigation revealed that activities and exercises using surveillance drones in both areas were indeed carried out under the authority of USSOCOM in 2010 and 2009 respectively.

Furthermore, the use and storage of drones was confirmed by the offices of Senators in both states:

In New Hampshire, a local newspaper has now confirmed with the office of Senator Kelly Ayotte that in 2010, Navy Special Operations Forces utilized areas around Mt. Washington to conduct training operations using Wasp and Raven drones.  David Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph was further able to confirm via Army Lt. Col. James Gregorythat similar exercises were also conducted in 2009 using the same types of drones.

In Oregon, the Willamette Week was able to confirm with the office of Sen. Ron Wydenthat drones are currently stored in Portland for several military units in the area.

“If the military wishes to counter controversy from the increasing integration of drones into domestic airspace, then it may help to not make statements to press that are inaccurate or disproved by publicly available congressional reports.” the group notes, adding that USSOCOM “denied or misrepresented” its involvement in domestic drone activities and actively sought to shut down any exchange of information on the matter.

Returning to the latest FAA documents, released by the EFF, they also  highlight scores of cases of law enforcement and government agencies operating drones in US skies.

The records show that several police departments are most interested in using drones to “surveil people of interest”, and search for drug farms and narcotics transactions. In many cases, the drones are fitted with thermal imaging and light detection technology, which could have significant ramifications for the privacy of everyday Americans.

Indeed, LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) technology is already used in high tech police speed guns. EFF notes that it is no great stretch to imagine police departments using the technology in conjunction with drones to monitor traffic and flag up violations. Infowars has already witnessed first hand, the Highway Department using drones to survey traffic.

EFF notes that while the documents do address some concerns over safety in law enforcement use of drones, previously raised in separate FAA documents, “once again, the records do not show that the FAA had any concerns about drone flights’ impact on privacy and civil liberties.”

This is particularly concerning, given that other previously released FAA documents have proven that the roll out of domestic unmanned drones will, for the most part, be focused solely on the mass surveillance of the American people.

The latest documents show that police departments in Maryland, Alabama, Texas, Colorado, and Florida, as well as agencies such as the Washington State Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Forest Service, and the California Department of Forestry, as well as several universities are all using drones. While some were forthcoming with information on the drone programs, others withheld some or most information on them, citing security and sensitivity issues.