US Begins Sophisticated Wireless Jamming Project 157
coondoggie writes "Looking to begin developing algorithms and other technology to automatically learn to jam certain new wireless transmissions that may threaten US military personnel, BAE Systems recently got about $8.4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to begin work on what's known as the Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare (BLADE) system. According to DARPA: As wireless communication devices become more adaptive and responsive to their environment by using technology such as Dynamic Spectrum Allocation, the effectiveness of fixed countermeasures may become severely degraded. The BLADE program will develop algorithms and techniques that will let our electronic warfare systems automatically learn to jam new RF threats in the field."
Old Technology in a new dress (Score:5, Informative)
This technology has been around since the 60's and was used before the Vietnam war, as well as during the Vietnam War makes this non-news.
Do a little research and you will find out that during the Apollo moon mission that Army Intelligence at Ft Hood jammed a frequency outside of the listed bands. Apparently they were field testing high powered multi-frequency jammers before being deployed into Vietnam. The field manual was very light and they were instructed to avoid certain bands that were coded red. It turned out to be a private frequency for NASA, which caused a two minute loss of communication with the Apollo team. The reason they knew about the Apollo comm link was two truckloads of intelligence spooks arrive at the site of their outpost. They were interviewed and informed that they had inadvertently knocked Houston's comms down and caused a two minute panic because the primary frequency and the backup frequency were unavailable for communication with the Apollo astronauts.
VFW halls, best halls.
Re:Only $8 Million ? (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually pretty complicated. I used to be a military communications officer, so I have some idea of what they're trying to do here. The way modern military radios work is they take an entire spectrum and jump frequencies around a hundred times a second (that's what the US radios do, I assume enemy technology to be on par) based on an algorithm, a frequency plan, and a randomly generated salt which is a shared secret between all the radios. Unless you have all three pieces or you can use something like this adaptive "smart jammer" they want to develop, you can't jam the radios without jamming the entire spectrum. That's possible of course, but a) it takes a lot of power and b) it typically jams your radios too.
The trick here is that you don't want to create a radio "dead space" you want to jam enemy communications while leaving your own untouched. Your friend created a broad spectrum jammer. It crudely killed anything in the immediate area that was trying to use any frequency close to the one he was broadcasting on. Since there's a fairly limited number of channels that wifi runs on, and they're published frequency ranges, it was fairly trivial to scan each channel (which a WAP is doing anyway) to jam the correct one, or just broadcast on all of them. Now imagine your trying to jam a device that can use any frequency in the VHF range, has a list of 10,000 freqs it may be using, is changing freqs once every .001 seconds, and is jumping in away that appears random without the algorithm and salt. You probably have the algorithm, but the salt is only stored on secure devices that self wipe after either a certain number of failed password attempts or any attempt to access the internals. On top of that, since the enemy is almost certainly using more than one channel to communicate, you have to sort which devices are one which channels. All of which are that complicated. Finally, you have to do all of this without impacting your own communication systems which are doing the same thing on the same freq band.
Still seem easy?