Trojan Kill Switches In Military Technology

Nrbelex writes "The New York Times reports in this week's Science section that hardware and software trojan kill switches in military devices are an increasing concern, and may have already been used. 'A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected, partly-constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars. Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.'"

Thatcher and Argentina

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Thatcher kill the Argentina's French made missiles during the Falklands war with a remote kill code?

Re:Open Source

[ElectricTurtle]

4chan is not your personal army...

Re:Thatcher and Argentina

[HawkinsD]

Perhaps you're referring to the French-made Exocet missiles, launched from the Argentine Super Etendard planes? The 20 dead sailors on HMS Sheffield, sunk by an Exocet, would disagree.

Re:Thatcher and Argentina

[Xiph]

Are you referring to the french made Exocet [wikipedia.org] missiles that sank the type 42 destroyer HMS Sheffield causing 44 casaulties, whereof 20 were fatal?

Backdoor

[michaelmalak]

IEEE Spectrum properly refers to the attack on the Syrian hardware as a "back door". The New York Times not only failed to use the Hacker's Dictionary [catb.org], it failed to use the terminology from IEEE Spectrum, which it even hyperlinked to.

Re:Lesson learned?

[Hal_Porter]

That's assuming you can do it yourself. Syria is hardly a hotbed of industry and innovation, and most of the Middle East is even worse. E.g. when Libya gave up their "nuclear and biological weapons program", which had been reasonably well funded and resourced over several decades had lead to only one viable weapon, a landmine spiked with human faeces.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/21/politics.libya [guardian.co.uk]

Libya's biological weapons programme too has suffered from similar mismanagement and lack of funds, say sources; at best succeeding in producing munitions boobytrapped with human faeces that can be fatal if it enters the blood stream.

So it's not too surprising these sorts of countries decided to buy stuff from the USSR instead. Unfortunately for them the Russians had a cunning plan with weapons. Soviet weapons systems actually came in two variants - a high end one to be made in peace time and a stripped down one to be made in a war quickly and in larger quantities. The export customers got the stripped down version, known as the 'monkey model'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_model [wikipedia.org]

The term was popularized in the West by Viktor Suvorov, in Inside the Soviet Army. Suvorov states that the simplified monkey model was designed for massive production in wartime, to replace front-line stocks if a war should last for several weeks. In peacetime, Soviet industry gained experience building both standard and monkey-model variants, the latter being for sale "to the 'brothers' and 'friends' of the USSR as the very latest equipment available." He also cites the benefit of disinformation when an exported monkey model fell into the hands of Western intelligence, who "naturally gained a completely false impression of the true combat capabilities of the BMP-1 and of Soviet tanks".

I.e. the monkey model looked the same or similar to the domestic version but was cheaper to make and had far inferior capabilities.

Re:Thatcher and Argentina

[HawkinsD]

Wait! I retract my earlier assertion.

According to this article [theage.com.au] (cited elsewhere in this thread by acb) about French President Mitterand, PM Thatcher successfully pressured the French to reveal the "codes to make the Exocets deaf and blind" after the Sheffield was sunk.

Very interesting.

Re:Idiots

[tehdaemon]

In general, your objections are valid. In this case, the device with the supposed kill switch is a radar. A giant radio receiver. You would be hard pressed to find a better communication channel than that, and it is hidden in plain sight.

Everything that is received by the radar goes through software at some point or other, and this is not trivial stuff, it is likely in ROM and not easily dumped or disassembled. Possibly encrypted to boot. A kill switch in general? Hard. For a radar? very plausible, and most of your objections have a simple answer for a radar.

T

Re:Open Source

[ElectricTurtle]

Except in that case, 'they' isn't 4chan leadership like moot, it's just Anonymous #1 saying to Anonymous #2, hey, let's go do this, and then a fuckton of people sign on to it. 'Project Chanology' was something of a fluke, insofar as it accomplished something approaching 'useful', but most chanraids are just immature griefer mobs that do things like close the pool at Habbo Hotel.

4chan has provided a means by which people can organize themselves with little fear of social retribution, but 4chan itself is NOT an organizing force.

Re:Open Source

[ultranova]

But I am also well acquainted with folks who work every day on the tech side of the defense industry.

You mean those people who have NDAs and will likely get charged with treason if they tell you anything of what they actually do? Or the people who have no NDAs because they do nothing of importance?

Oh well, never mind, I'm sure either of these would make for an extremely reliable source of information.

Re:Standard operating procedure

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that there is no evidence that any explosion took place. The whole story is based on the book of a former Reagan administration official. Go ahead and check newspaper archives at at that time, and you will find no mention of any explosion. I suppose you could claim it was covered up by the Soviets, but if it was truly a "massive" explosion, I doubt they could have achieved a complete media blackout.

In addition, the entire story is described as a hoax here:

http://www.bookscape.co.uk/short_stories/computer_hoaxes.php

I think it's fair to say The Great Trans-Siberian Pipeline Computer Sabotage of 1982 is dubious at best.

Re:Open Source

[TubeSteak]

Which in no way contradicts your experience based statement, which I interpret as: "you really do need lots of advanced hi-tech to build an accurate, advanced, effective killing machine"

http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/cruise.shtml [aardvark.co.nz]
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/ [interestingprojects.com]

This is years old and I have no idea how his story ended.
Last I read, the New Zealand version of the IRS had dropped on his head like a ton of bricks...
But since he's updated his site this year, I guess he's 'back'.

Re:Lesson learned?

[mcgrew]

Is America planning to invade France?

In 1980 nobody would have dreamed we'd be invading Afghanistan; we were supplying the Taliban with arms to fight the Soviets with.

Re:It's not very sophisticated after all

[makuabob]

Need to mod jbeaupre up one more point; he is not just "interesting," he's right! I worked some years w/ military trainers where 'tactics' were practiced,... and practiced,... and practiced,... The 'kill' switch would very likely have been in the IFF coding. The RADAR hits the plane with an IFF "interrogate" code and the plane squawks back, "These 'droids aren't the 'droids you're looking for." The RADAR agrees and goes to sleep, never to awaken!