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From AnonTechie:
This summer the insurgent group ISIL captured the Iraqi city of Mosul—and along with it, three army divisions’ worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army, including Humvees, helicopters, antiaircraft cannons and M1 Abrams tanks. ISIL staged a parade with its new weapons and then deployed them to capture the strategic Mosul Dam from outgunned Kurdish defenders. The U.S. began conducting air strikes and rearming the Kurds to even the score against its own weaponry. As a result, even more weapons have been added to the conflict, and local arms bazaars have reportedly seen an influx of supply.
It is past time that we consider whether we should build in a way to remotely disable such dangerous tools in an emergency. Other technologies, including smartphones, already incorporate this kind of capability. The theft of iPhones plummeted this year after Apple introduced a remote “kill switch,” which a phone’s owner can use to make sure no one else can use his or her lost or stolen phone. If this feature is worth putting in consumer devices, why not embed it in devices that can be so devastatingly repurposed—including against their rightful owners, as at the Mosul Dam?
And from Hugh Pickens:
Jonathan Zittrain writes in Scientific American that when ISIL captured the Iraqi city of Mosul this summer, it also captured three army divisions’ worth of U.S.-supplied equipment from the Iraqi army, including Humvees, helicopters, antiaircraft cannons and M1 Abrams tanks. Zittrain says that it is past time that we consider building in a way to remotely disable such dangerous tools in an emergency. "Other technologies, including smartphones, already incorporate this kind of capability," says Zittrain. "The theft of iPhones plummeted this year after Apple introduced a remote “kill switch,” which a phone’s owner can use to make sure no one else can use his or her lost or stolen phone. If this feature is worth putting in consumer devices, why not embed it in devices that can be so devastatingly repurposed—including against their rightful owners, as at the Mosul Dam?"
At least one foreign policy analyst has suggested incorporating GPS limitations into Stinger surface-to-air missiles to assist the Free Syrian Army in its defenses against air attack while ensuring that the missiles are useless outside that theater of conflict. More simply, any device with onboard electronics, such as a Stinger or a modern tank, could have a timed expiration; the device could operate after the expiration date only if it receives a coded “renew” signal from any of a number of overhead satellites. The renewal would take effect as a matter of course—unless, say, the weapons were stolen. This fail-safe mechanism could be built using basic and well-tested digital signature-and-authentication technologies. One example is the permissive action link devices by which American nuclear weapons are secured so that they can be activated only when specific codes are shared. Another involves the protocols by which military drones are operated remotely and yet increasingly safeguarded against digital hijacking.
Today, however, we are making a conscious choice to create and share medium and heavy weaponry while not restricting its use. This choice has very real impacts. If they can save even one innocent life at the end of a deactivated U.S. barrel, including the lives of our own soldiers, kill switches are worth a serious look.
What do you think? Should there be a kill switch or an activation switch? [Related]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-hunt-for-the-kill-switch
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spook brat on Monday September 22 2014, @03:32PM
One example is the permissive action link devices by which American nuclear weapons are secured so that they can be activated only when specific codes are shared.
If they can save even one innocent life at the end of a deactivated U.S. barrel, including the lives of our own soldiers, kill switches are worth a serious look.
I'm glad that they included that bit about our own soldiers; it turns my stomach when someone makes a suggestion like this and doesn't even pay lip service to the safety of the people whose lives it would most affect/endanger. Long rant averted, but only just barely.
The analysts making this suggestion don't know what they're talking about, and don't realize that critical systems already have measures like this in place where appropriate. Citing their own example, nuclear weapons best mode for failed authentication is to do nothing and stay in the silo. At the other end of the spectrum, small arms (pistols/rifles) will never get a James Bond style fingerprint scanner. The Airmen manning the missile silos are in no danger personally if the missile doesn't fire; if a small arm fails to fire in the hands of its intended operator it is a death sentence for that operator. Further, equipment size/weight is not a consideration when you're setting up a missile (beyond digging a slightly bigger hole in the ground); every ounce of extra weight in a firearm must justify its usefulness because some poor grunt is going to carry that thing with them with just the strength of their poor straight infantry legs. Adding weight that might get them killed is a non-starter as far as arguments go.
In the middle you have things like Stinger missiles, Abrams tanks, and Apache helicopters. It is my understanding that there is already a "bugout button" on the sensitive electronics for those, which is just about the limit of what the pilots will accept in terms of built-in failure mode. A prime example is the SINCGARS radio: voice encryption and frequency hopping data are loaded periodically, expire on a set schedule, and have a setting on the radio for clearing out the data in an emergency.
So here's a counter-offer for the analysts who want a remote kill switch: instead of building in a way for the enemy to shut down our tanks and helicopters with a radio signal, how about we update the targeting/navigation computers with a timeout function? Make it a routine maintenance thing to have the computer's self-destruct timer reset at the end of each mission, or perhaps once a month. Since we're talking about how to stop captured materiel from being useful to those overrunning our bases, as long as the dongle for performing the reset is easily carried or destroyed when the base is overrun (like the encryption key storage devices for the radios; we've already got procedures and experience in place) then the timeout determines how long the captured platforms can operate.
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Monday September 22 2014, @04:14PM
So here's a counter-offer for the analysts who want a remote kill switch: instead of building in a way for the enemy to shut down our tanks and helicopters with a radio signal, how about we update the targeting/navigation computers with a timeout function? Make it a routine maintenance thing to have the computer's self-destruct timer reset at the end of each mission, or perhaps once a month. Since we're talking about how to stop captured materiel from being useful to those overrunning our bases, as long as the dongle for performing the reset is easily carried or destroyed when the base is overrun (like the encryption key storage devices for the radios; we've already got procedures and experience in place) then the timeout determines how long the captured platforms can operate.
Yeah, because there's nothing better than e.g. your helicopter getting hit by ground fire and instead of trying to patch it and fly home, you have to leave on foot before the chopper self-destructs because you're going to go over the mission time and can't reset it yourself.
Or you set the autodestruct timeout longer, and they capture it and can only use it in one attack on you...which, as people say above, is probably all the use they were going to get out of it anyway.
I don't see this problem as being solvable to cover all cases. All you can get is closest approximation. You can't get 100% prevention from enemy usefulness AND 100% safety of those you want to keep safe. Either it fails safe, and the enemy uses it, or it fails deadly, and you always run the risk of the "good guys" getting hurt by it (I guarantee you sooner or later there'll be a bug in the system and it'll go off when you don't want it to), or you're in the middle somewhere.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Spook brat on Tuesday September 23 2014, @02:03AM
I don't see this problem as being solvable to cover all cases. All you can get is closest approximation. You can't get 100% prevention from enemy usefulness AND 100% safety of those you want to keep safe. Either it fails safe, and the enemy uses it, or it fails deadly, and you always run the risk of the "good guys" getting hurt by it
Yep, that's the best reason not to do this. I expect that cooler heads will prevail and this "kill switch" idea will go in the round file where it belongs.
Travel the galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms... And kill them [schlockmercenary.com]