DARPA Funds a $300 Software-Defined Radio For Hackers 94
Sparrowvsrevolution writes with this story from Forbes: "Over the weekend at the ToorCon hacker conference in San Diego, Michael Ossmann of Great Scott Gadgets revealed a beta version of the HackRF Jawbreaker, the latest model of the wireless Swiss-army knife tools known as 'software-defined radios.' Like any software-defined radio, the HackRF can shift between different frequencies as easily as a computer switches between applications–It can both read and transmit signals from 100 megahertz to 6 gigahertz, intercepting or reproducing frequencies used by everything from FM radios to police communications to garage door openers to WiFi and GSM to next-generation air traffic control system messages. At Ossmann's target price of $300, the versatile, open-source devices would cost less than half as much as currently existing software-defined radios with the same capabilities. And to fund the beta testing phase of HackRF, the Department of Defense research arm known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pitched in $200,000 last February as part of its Cyber Fast Track program."
Antennas (Score:5, Interesting)
Antenna design for this must be miserable...
Anyone know if there is a good way to have relatively optimized reception over that whole spectrum without having to swap your antennas when changing frequencies?
- Toast
First post?
Re:combine that with computing power.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is that you've always been able to do that. Radio hams have been building radios and you've been able to buy scanners that will let you listen and transmit on any frequency you like for decades.
That's part of the article summary - people STILL using "security by obscurity" because they don't expect people to bother to record, modify and playback openly-available data is LUDICROUS. See the article just now about being able to scam public transport because of homebrew-encryption used over the airwaves.
The problem is not the airwaves, or the devices available to read them. They've existed since Marconi, if you had the brains. It's that people still deploy systems where the wireless part is treated like some mystical, magical medium that stops people doing things to it.
You can already listen to GSM. Radio hams found and cracked the encryption on it before it was even standardised. 3G technologies have similar problems. DECT, also. Smart-meters, some of them too. The problem is relying on untested encryption or no encryption/authentication at all in order to make things work and then being shocked when someone clones your phone.
This is nothing new. It just makes it slightly cheaper and more convenient.