Govt. to use 802.11b to control warships.....

[ck3k]

Jason Straight writes "There's a story at pcworld, that describes how navy warships will be equipped with 802.11b networking to allow the captain to control the ship from anywhere on the ship. " The point of the article also gets into the issue of cutting manpower for the ships - going from 300 people on each to destroyer to 90, and makes the point that the only way to do is through automation.

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/01/2....shtml?tid=126

802.11b is not the securest thing in the world, and now will be in charge of the NAVY, I just thought of a million reasons this wouldnt be a good idea.....but its the Government after all..... ;)

[blackwave]

What's next warship 802.11b homing torpedoes (powered by kismet) ?

[TwinVega]

They could have a 802.11b enabled airplane, the customers could pay money to fly the plane around a bit, it would save millions of dollars and generate revenue. Great idea.....

[ck3k]

Originally posted by blackwave
What's next warship 802.11b homing torpedoes (powered by kismet) ?

so you cant bring toe nail clippers on an airplane for phear of terrorists, but what if a terrorist decided to hijack a warship? I never have thought highly of my government, but I think if they lurked they would see the security holes in wi-fi, thus saving them the problem of someone hijacking a ship.

[octalpus]

Anyone up for a little waryachting?

[converge]

hmm, note to self... possible alternate gui for warglue... think.. battleship

[murakami]

Originally posted by ck3k
so you cant bring toe nail clippers on an airplane for phear of terrorists, but what if a terrorist decided to hijack a warship? I never have thought highly of my government, but I think if they lurked they would see the security holes in wi-fi, thus saving them the problem of someone hijacking a ship.

Gimme an f'ing break. As we all know, 802.11b is a standard that you can add security protocols (Radius, vpn, Harris crypto chip, etc), which is what the Airwave does. Its tiring to listen to the wireless insecurity hysteria, especially when we all know that the majority of the problem is due to misconfiguration or a lack of it. We really shouldn't add to the hysteria.

[TwinVega]

But do you really want a huge ship under the control of something that has the possibility of penetration? Even though the measures you talk about seem to be secure now, there are always ways being discovered to bypass security.

[murakami]

Originally posted by TwinVega
But do you really want a huge ship under the control of something that has the possibility of penetration? Even though the measures you talk about seem to be secure now, there are always ways being discovered to bypass security.

Read the article:

"The USS Howard, a guided-missile destroyer commissioned in 2001 and assigned to the Navy's 3rd Fleet, based in San Diego, is being outfitted with specialized wireless gateways based on the IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN standard. The gateways, which defense contractor 3E Technologies International (3ETI) designed and built, use a radio link to interconnect sensors on gear such as pumps and motors with back-end data processing applications.

So instead of laying hundreds of feet of cabling by cutting through a steel ship and adding weight to the vessel, the radio link makes possible much faster and less-disruptive deployment of the sensors."

That's sensors, not controls. Furthermore, do you really think they are going to allow anybody close enough to the ship to do anything?

Cracking dumb old WEP has been discussed endlessly on other forums, but so far all published exploits have been on gigs worth of packets captured in lab conditions, none in the wild.

I'm not saying that its impossible, but highly unlikely.

[blackwave]

Originally posted by c0nv3r9
hmm, note to self... possible alternate gui for warglue... think.. battleship

c0n, by jove, you've sniffed my battleship!

[astcell]

You'd think they would go with 802.11a at least. Does this mean we're all going to be broadcasting on military frequencies if we continue to use 802.11b?

[blackwave]

Originally posted by astcell
You'd think they would go with 802.11a at least. Does this mean we're all going to be broadcasting on military frequencies if we continue to use 802.11b?

yeah the .mil already had a few issues regarding wifi with their scanners..

[astcell]

Now it'll be that much easier to wardrive on base, after all if they receive my signal I could just be a battleship in disguise....

[Lin Dze]

Hmmm....

I worked with some officers from NPS who were working on the services next gen wirelesss projects. When they were describing the ship based monitor system it was more like the seamen would have PDAs with uplinks for logging info instead of notebooks. One of the funny things is that although the entire ship will have 802.11b they still have to run a metric fuckload of retrofitted cable. The entire ship is steel right, so each room gets an AP and all of these run on cat5 back to IDFs. kind of ironic i thought.

The more interesting project was a marine was working on the packet radio for the realtime battlefield comms. The jist of that system was low power packet systems (like 802.11b etc) on the ground units and then the forward observation systems have a midrange radio which uplinks to drones and they send to an AWACS which has the sat link and drops back down to the fleet.

Definatly no slouch though, some of their interesting tests were linking the NPS campus, then a mobile link off the top of a nearby peak, and some links across the bay to see if they could get through the fog/convection layers etc.

course, all the cool guys at my location have already been reassigned so im like 6 montjs out of date here.

[TwinVega]

Originally posted by murakami
That's sensors, not controls. Furthermore, do you really think they are going to allow anybody close enough to the ship to do anything?

Cracking dumb old WEP has been discussed endlessly on other forums, but so far all published exploits have been on gigs worth of packets captured in lab conditions, none in the wild.

I'm not saying that its impossible, but highly unlikely.

A ship cannot afford to be compromised. http://www.suu.edu/it/nws/wireless/security.html . Just a simple jamming can screw up the sensors and render the ship useless if those sensors are essential. I'm not saying it's very likely, but it is able to happen, and that sort of thing should not be chanced. We agree on the possibility of it happening, I just want to make damn sure it is not able to happen.