AR Drone That Infects Other Drones With Virus Wins DroneGames

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/ar-drone-that-infects-other-drones-with-virus-wins-dronegames#.UMD0EHJvf8o.hackernews

by eguizzo • 14 years ago

183 62 14 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

paupino_masano• 14 years ago

The source code for this is on Github: https://github.com/substack/virus-copter

0x02• 14 years ago

Did I read that correctly, that you can simply telnet to the copter's IP address and get a (root?) shell just like that?

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

Looks like you read that correctly. Probably shouldn't be too surprising since they are toy helicopters, though you would probably want to close that if you try to run a taco delivery company with them.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

Not awfully surprising. It's a toy, not a Predator. Security likely was not a major design concern, and I don't really blame them. Probably even intentional to a degree, to make (owner-sourced) hacking easier.

donpdonp• 14 years ago

I was surprised too. Anyone have a video of a drone infecting another drone?

The symptoms of infection should be obvious:

    var actions = [
      function () { up(Math.random() * 2 - 1) },
      function () { left(Math.random() * 2 - 1) },
      function () { turn(Math.random() * 2 - 1) },
    ];
    actions[Math.floor(Math.random() * actions.length)]();

kleiba• 14 years ago

OMG!!! What if terrorists did the same thing to turn drones against us?? We need more drones to fly above the current generation of drones and monitor them NOW!

phy6• 14 years ago

They tried this in Terminator Salvation, it was just a honeypot. Here's another nefarious use for AR drones: http://static.usenix.org/events/woot11/tech/final_files/Reed...

saym• 14 years ago

This 'virus' shows how open the drones truly are. Let's get started on a security module!

I think the AR Drones provide a great platform that non-programmers can get excited about and in turn want to program themselves.

The drone is a perfect combination of functionality and openness.

sp332• 14 years ago

"Security module"? You can't bolt-on security.

enraged_camel• 14 years ago

What I liked about this the most is that the winning team thought outside the box. While most people focused on "how do we make this drone fly better?" these guys focused on "how do we sabotage the other drones?"

mephi5t0• 14 years ago

The Game of Drones. Winter is coming.

gorrillamcd3• 14 years ago

What's interesting is the "virus" could be combined with the second-place winner ("multidrone") to make a drone botnet instead of just having the infected drones "run amok".

stephengillie• 14 years ago

Could we set up a mesh network on that drone-botnet? How much storage would each one have? We could hide that datacenter in a cloud!

gorrillamcd3• 14 years ago

Actually, there's some practical application for that. In an emergency situation where communication is down, a network of drones could be setup to provide a network for first-responders and aid-workers to coordinate their efforts. It could even tie-in to base stations that would have the long-range power to connect different meshes. (note: I know nothing about these drones, but looking at what's been done already, it's seems feasible).

moepstar• 14 years ago

IIRC, The PirateBay did/does/wanted to do something like that?

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/03/19/low-o...

emiliobumachar• 14 years ago

Ah! Finally a meaning for 'cloud computing' that substantially differentiates itself from 'over the internet' ;)

wmil• 14 years ago

And next thing you know, you're at war with the Geth.

ImprovedSilence• 14 years ago

Combine that with the third guy and unlimited range, and you have DRONEMAGEDDON!

cs7022• 14 years ago

A clever strategy that few thought of; it deserved to win.

On the downside, this is surely going to give me nightmares about government drones getting infected with a terrorist virus and unleashing drone-botnet-mageddon on the masses.

sliverstorm5• 14 years ago

How quaint, a terrorist virus? No, it'll probably just be normal government drones with normal government software that unleashes drone-ageddon on the masses.

Whether it's a robot uprising, or a bug/oversight in the software, or Big Brother, is up to your own personal taste in dystopian horrors.

r00fus• 14 years ago

The terrorist virus is simply plausible deniability so the government can continue it's progression towards new world order.

I mean, who really thought Bin Laden had that much power or legitimacy?

cobrausn• 14 years ago

I agree with the first point. It did deserve to win.

In regards to the second point, I think you've been playing too much Black Ops 2.

pmorici• 14 years ago

It's not totally w/o precedent...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/insurgents-intercept...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/

walru• 14 years ago

..and now everyone with an account on Hacker News is a potential terror suspect.

JakeSc• 14 years ago

You're afraid of typing the wrong things too? And also when the pixels on your monitor make certain patterns?

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

If you want a taste of that today, there are places you could move (Yemen, Pakistan..)

bigiain3• 14 years ago

Since it seems the biggest users of viruses, and presumably the most talented virus writers, are those doing ddos attacks against other websites…

Who wants to guess at when the first p0wned Reaper or Predator takes out a datacenter housing servers for someone who's annoyed Anonymous, or perhaps a competing poker/porn/pills site?

(That'll make a change from the usual "Cascading failures in us-1-east" post-mortem blog posts…)

jackpirate• 14 years ago

Sort of like what Iran did?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

penguin_gab• 14 years ago

The source code for the script for infected drones is at Github, it should be easy to identify a hacked drone -

function () { up(Math.random() * 2 - 1) }, function () { left(Math.random() * 2 - 1) }, function () { turn(Math.random() * 2 - 1) },

A scary thought would be U.S military drones ever getting infected by terrorists, and the source code goes -

function firePredatorMissile(coordinates) { ... }

firePredatorMissile(computedLargestCivilianCluster.coordinates)

And if you combine this with the fact that it can hack nearby drones and control them as well..

mc322• 14 years ago

Although this wasn't a proper war game, it tangentially reminds me of Colonel Van Riper's pesky 'enemies' defeating the hometeam via peskiness and outsmarting the technological advantage of the home team. In one scenario, the Van Riper's team 'sunk' a flotilla but the warroomers 'refloated' them, just because.[1]

"For instance—and here is where he displayed prescience—Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue's super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology. He maneuvered Red forces constantly. At one point in the game, when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, "refloated" the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)"

[1]http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/...

nnq• 14 years ago

even in the game with Van Riper, you could assume that your intelligence agencies did the right thing at preventing his unorthodox tactics and that's why some of his actions were never carried out. after all, if your army is (obviously) better equipped for fighting a conventional war, as opposed to the enemy, then is the job of your intelligence services to push the war towards a more traditional style war that you can win, so if the controllers assumed such a scenario their actions in such a game could be somewhat justifiable (again, assuming the red didn't have the resources of an intelligence agency backed by a wealthy nation).

now if you were to treat the AR drones competition as some sort of war game, you would have to assume such hacking capabilities on both sides, probably balancing out or interacting in interesting ways...

biot2• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a time in high school where I participated in a physics olympics competition. One of the events was to construct a bridge out of provided materials capable of supporting the most weight. The score you received was calculated as:

  (sum of weights supported) / (time taken to place weights)

The winning team placed a really small amount of weight in what the judges measured as 0.1 seconds of time. They cleverly gamed the rules to take advantage that a small time would act as a multiplier. Our team came in second for that event even though our bridge supported many times the weight theirs did, even if you took as long as you wanted to place the weights. It was a bit of an abuse of the rules and I felt it went against the spirit of the competition which was to engineer a solid bridge.

In this situation, by crippling potentially better drones the virus copter may have ended up technically winning but the measure by which it won may be different than what was intended. That said, it will definitely bring to the forefront a better approach to security which will have long-term benefits.

sliverstorm5• 14 years ago

The scoring calculation just needs to be tweaked a little. Presumably the goal is to prevent teams from building a fragile bridge that needs exceedingly delicate placement of weights. So perhaps something like:

(sum of weights supported) / exp(time taken to place weights)

Then, select units or add a constant such that you ensure contestants have a minute or two where the ramp-up of time penalty remains modest.

cs7022• 14 years ago

I'm not sure your analogy applies in this case. The team that won the DroneGames HAD the BEST strategy: crippling the other drones!

This reminds of a story I heard a long time ago about a fighter in the middle of some nasty civil war who complained to a TV reporter: "no one here respects the Law of The Jungle anymore!"

biot2• 14 years ago

http://dronegames.co/ doesn't state what the judging criteria is. If it's "survive to the end" then why not heavily shield your drone, bolt it to a fixed stand, affix a heavy EMP generator, and fry all the other electronics in the room? Your drone won't be able to do anything useful as it's bolted down but its shielding will at least allow the electronics to blink some lights and technically you could win on that fact alone.

Presumably such a tactic would violate the spirit, which I take to be demonstrating cool and unique capabilities without having to deal with hostile threats. However, I haven't been following, so perhaps drone to drone interference is actively encouraged and expected.

vidar• 14 years ago

As Mike Tyson said: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."

jjwiseman• 14 years ago

I was there and as far as I know the drone didn't infect anything. In the end, I think he had to run amok.js manually on his own drone (substack, correct me if I'm wrong).

This contest was a lot like the first DARPA Grand Challenge--There was a lot of crashing, and if anyone made it out of the gate/left the ground there was a lot of applause. I expect the next Drone Games will be like the subsequent Grand Challenge where the execution finally matched the ambition.

bigiain3• 14 years ago

I'll bet the other team members have gone on to highly lucrative careers in consulting.

The "spirit of the competition" is much like the "customer's objectives" - a concept to be completely ignored while scrutinizing the rules/specs to work out how to collect the prize/fee whilst doing the minimum amount of work.

marblar• 14 years ago

Let's hope next time they used:

weight / ( 1 + time )

IgorPartola• 14 years ago

I did a similar thing in high school. The formula was different: weight * length. Thus you could build a long bridge (limited by amount of materials) and place very little weight. We did not win.

dkersten• 14 years ago

Next time they should combine these with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU

tmarthal• 14 years ago

I know it's science-fiction, but the 2010 book <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief>The Quantum Thief</a> makes use of weapons like these: basically firing a missile to get physical access to your adversary's computer systems with some sort of payload, and that payload of which will scan and disrupt the opponent's system.

Ingaz• 14 years ago

More realistic episode was in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kikokugai:_The_Cyber_Slayer .

Physical attack on enemy corporation was just a diversion. The real attack was on corporation network. Main computer gone nuts and started selling and buying in most ineffective way. Corporation was destroyed after several minutes.

wingerlang• 14 years ago

Is there any video of this in action?

kunil• 14 years ago

This sounds weird to me. How do they infect a system that they never saw before? Did the wrote the virus on the fly? Or those drones have a common library with a bug or something.

This is like a Hollywood movie with a bad script

Aissen• 14 years ago

The drones are identical for this competition; and are running an unprotected telnet server on the same wireless network. Just look at the code: https://github.com/substack/virus-copter

This only proves that the organizers had no technical background whatsoever.

yardie• 14 years ago

These are the retail standard AR Drones with their own Wifi APs and telnetd enabled. It's not the organizers job to secure them. Would you expect the Defcon organizers to do the same for the attendees?

sandfox• 14 years ago

Pray child, please explain further how you have come to this conclusion. I'm not sure I'm following you.

AR Drone That Infects Other Drones With Virus Wins DroneGames

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