Security aspects in the context of drones

Image you are sitting on your balcony after a stressful working day. Your legs on a chair, an ice cold beer in your hand and the afternoon sun on your face. Suddenly the light darkens and a soft buzz is filling the air, constantly getting louder and more annoying.  A cold breeze causes goosebumps on your arms. What’s happening here? A drone enters your view, delivering a new TV device to your neighbour. You sink back in your chair and release the air you had hold unconsciously in your lungs.

Drones are flying robots, also called unmanned aircrafts, available in every size for actions that are dangerous or repetitive for humans. Today they still need to be controlled and closely monitored by one or two pilots via remote control. But in the future, artificial intelligence, included as their “brains”, could allow them to work autonomously to support us in our daily routines, science or warfare. They have many advantages, but we also found alarming facts and stories about how their use is harmful to our society and mankind. Have a look to understand what we’re talking about…

“We’re entering the drone age” [Chris Anderson]

Automation is progressing in all parts of the industry and manpower continues to be supported or replaced by machines. When people hear the word “drone”, they mostly think either of war drones or of quadrocopters used for leisure and filming. As the following passage shows, drones have countless other fields of application in the civil sector and the industry – some of them might surprise you.

Drones are nowadays an indispensable part of the agricultural industry. Equipped with infrared cameras and sensors, they can be used to optimize the utilization of fertilizer and pesticide by monitoring the fields for pests and lack of nutrients and water. This so called precision farming will certainly soon be common practice in the agribusiness. Other industrial sectors are also relying more and more on drones for tasks which would take too long for humans to complete. One of them is the inspection and survey of industrial facilities, especially power stations, using high resolution cameras.

Amazon, DHL and the german post office are testing drones for the delivery of packages and goods. Currently the government is blocking this development, the regulations to fly drones for commercial use are very strict. But the day will come, when drones are a common sight in the  skies above our cities. This will have a huge impact on the transportation business, and on the employment market in general.

First drones for medical transport are developed in Israel. Compared to helicopters, they can fly under worse weather conditions and need a smaller space to land. Those ambulance drones can rescue people in difficult terrain. The military shows great interest in this concept for medical evacuations, because there is no need of a pilot which could be endangered.

The states in Germany are buying drones for the police as well as the fire department. They are used for search and rescue operations – and for surveillance of larger crowds of people. The later causes some controversy and discussion about the right to privacy – as shown in the following paragraph, this is one of the key questions which need to be addressed when talking about drones.

Drones are also employed in various research projects – some of the size of cent coins are used detect the reasons for the colony collapse of bees.

In addition more and more people are buying drones for filming and photographing, either for journalism or for private use: Smaller ones can be purchased for an achievable price, which ranges from 50-2000€.

Problems

But as mentioned before, even smaller drones are a problem for security. First of all, if a drone malfunctions and crashes into a crowd of people, this can lead to serious injuries or even death. Secondly they are a threat to the right of privacy. Equipped with high resolution cameras, web capabilities and sensors, they can be used to monitor nearly everything and everyone, whether the person agrees or not. This also leads to industrial espionage, another threat for businesses and organisations, which can cost a lot of money or damage the reputation of a company.

Furthermore, drones owned by journalists or curious bystanders are known for interfering with rescue missions of police and fire department, preventing helicopters from landing or taking photos of accident victims .

There have also been reports of nearly collisions with commercial airplanes and the smuggling of goods in and out of prisons.

Solutions/ Defense

Most of these problems are addressed by the so called “no-fly zones”, which are determined by the cities and states. It is forbidden to fly drones near prisons, power plants, airports, crowds of people and scenes of accidents. But how can these regulations be enforced? How can the drones be restricted and, if necessary, be forced to land or be destroyed? What if the neighbor is enjoying flying his drone over your garden?

There are several approaches how to handle this issue. One of them is quite simple: get yourself a hunting eagle and train it to attack drones. This low-tech solution to a high-tech problem is utilized by police forces in the Netherlands and proves to be quite effective. Another possibility is to use other, bigger drones to catch drones with nets, as used by the Tokyo police department. For industrial facilities and power plants, there are special devices which can disturb the signal between the drone and its pilot, which forces the drone to land or to return to its starting point. Another possibility is the use of powerful lasers, which can burn a hole into the drone or completely destroy it. Such Star Wars-like lasers are currently developed by Boeing and will be available for the military in the next year – a frightening thought, even if it’s meant for defense. But presumably it’s better than drones carrying explosives into a nuclear power plant.

Threats from above: Flying computers

We have seen numerous opportunities and problems that drones can bring – but let’s remind ourselves of a fact: drones are flying computers. And computers can be hacked. This means, that not only their use can cause danger, even the drone itself can be targeted – no matter the size. There are countless competitions for drone hacking and there even have been reports of successful hacks of military drones.

Let’s start with civil drones. They are mostly designed to be user-friendly and comfortable to operate. Some of them have wi-fi enabled to stream videos or FTP and telnet servers with open ports. Others even have Node.js installed, which can execute server-sided JavaScript. No wonder that they have vulnerabilities which can be exploited. There are enough tutorials on the web how to do this – one option is the so called “SkyJack” hack by Samy Kamkar, which searches for victim drones autonomously, separates them from their pilots and then controls them – the open source code can be downloaded on github.

Certainly military drones are more secure than civil ones as they use encrypted communication channels. But even they can be vulnerable to GPS spoofing and other threats – and the attackers are highly skilled and motivated. As reported in the documents leaked by Snowden, the british and american secret agencies have already successfully hacked Israeli drones and monitored their video feeds. The used tools are also open source.

Conclusion

As you can imagine, the consequences of kidnapped drones – whether civil or military – can be severe. Tutorials and learning material on hacking, even professional hackers for hire can be found on the net. Drones therefore need to be much more secure to be part of our daily lives. But who will be responsible for standards and guidelines for secure drones? Who will lead the race between drone developing companies, security experts and attackers? Will we soon leave our houses wearing helmets, in fear of drones crashing on our heads? These will be some of the main challenges to be tackled in the future.

We have discussed some of the possible impacts of drones on our everyday lives – but how about the usage of drones in national security?

Secure the state

States in general and Germany in particular can be considered as complex systems, consisting of multiple components which interact with and influence each other. These elements can be of various types, for example institutions like governments, educational and health care systems, critical infrastructures, sensitive information of all kind.

In case of an attack from outside, one or multiple system elements can be damaged. Therefore it is necessary to protect and ensure security in the so called system “Germany”.

The question that arises is how safety can be assured? How is the foreign and security policy trying to ensure security? Which dangers and risks (and wars) are threatening the system “Germany”?

Foreign and Security Policy

A storm is brewing over Germany. The cloud of dangers and security threats in our time and the future is extending. Key words like climate and environmental disasters, plagues and epidemics, decayed states, migration developments, supply of the population as well as the supply of the industry with ressources, criminal (cyber) networks, threats and attacks of critical infrastructures and the international terrorism are included.

All these dangers hover over Germany, threatening to discharge every moment in a harmful and devastating thunderstorm, filled with destructiveness and thirst of power. The foreign and security policy has to take actions. It’s a serious situation.

Let’s take a look at what promises the German foreign and security policy makes to defuse this circumstances.

Germany’s foreign and security policy is built on four pillars. Besides the integration in Europe, the support of human rights and the participation in globalization, Germany encourages peace in a united Europe. Subsequently politics work in the fields of war prevention and disarmament, support and follow the EU, NATO, UN and G7. In crisis Germany wants to act preemptively against violent actions. Weapons should not be spreaded and arms should be controlled.

Will this behaviour prevent the thundercloud from releasing its harmful content? Shouldn’t we take stronger actions?

As mentioned above Germany wants to support every peaceful conflict resolution. In the same breath the Federal Ministry of Defence (Bundesministerum für Verteidigung, BMVg) says: “Zwar kann Sicherheit nicht vorrangig militärisch gewährleistet werden, allerdings sind […] Stabilität und Sicherheit notfalls auch mit militärischen Mitteln durchzusetzen.” which translates to “Security can not primarily be assured with military power, however if needed stability and security are ensured with military actions as well”.

The so called modern weapons are drones. But are the able to ensure securityy in the system “Germany”? Are there any other countries which are already using drones for military purposes? How and what can Germany learn from them?

Drones for the military

Drones in military contexts are used for exploration and surveillance. Beyond these use cases there are armed drones for eliminating enemies ressources. Currently Germany possesses only a few surveillance drones.

In future scenarios they want to lease armed drones from Israel. The problem is: those drones can not be used for defence, their solemn purpose is offensive warfare – a fact which contradicts the so called goals of Germany’s foreign policy. But compared to this the US have plenty of surveillance and armed drones like Predator or Reaper drones.

Operation of military drones

Drones are operated remotely via a satellite link between the plane/drone and the pilot. US drone pilots are usually stationed somewhere in the US while ‘their’ drones are flying hundreds of kilometers over the ocean in Pakistan.

Three persons are needed to manage a successful drone attack. One person flies and navigates the plane, one person observes and operates cameras and sensors which are installed in the drone and the third person stays in contact with commanders and ground forces directly involved in the battle.

In addition there are two US military bases in Germany, one in Ramstein (Pfalz) and one in Stuttgart-Möhringen/ Plieningen. They serve the US in their drone wars in Pakistan and Africa.

“War on terror”

Since 2004 the US fly hidden drone attacks in Pakistan. Since then they had 291 operations with US UAVs. Approximately 2500 had to die. Goals of these attacks are terror organisations like members of al-Qaeda, Taliban or IS.

Currently the decision of killing a person is under human orders. The following points need to be fulfilled:

• An informed high-ranking commander needs to confirm that the target person has terroristic intentions.
• In addition the target person must be threatening or planning an attack against the USA and a detention/ an arrest is currently not possible.

The attack should be necessary, accurately performed and appropriate as well as humane. It would be interesting to know what’s humane in killing someone…

Killing with drones is considered to be a clean war, only a few surgical attacks and a manageable amount of dead. Questionable! Well of course we can underline that no US soldiers are directly  involved and harmed. But surgical? Many civilians are killed! And using the word “clean” in the context of war? What is considered to be ‘clean’ when killing someone? There are no fair trials or any human rights are included in this murdering. And maybe, a quiet voice whispers in my head, maybe it lowers the obstacle when firing remotely instead of looking somebody directly in the eye before killing him or her.

Let the machines act: Skynet and other AIs in drones

Currently drones only act on human orders. But in a near future it might be possible that learning algorithms take over this task. There is for example “Skynet”, an algorithm developed by US scientists. It’s a piece of software that determines whether a person has terroristic intentions or not, taking decision trees and more than 90 different criteria as input. In case “Skynet” finds a potential courier for terror organisations, drones will kill that person.

Which mysterious theory is behind “Skynet”? Scientist assume that terrorists (or couriers and other groups working for terroristic organisations) have outstanding different behaviour in using phones than other citizens. Therefore the US started a comprehensive surveillance of 55 million users of the mobile communication network in Pakistan, including tracking in social networks, phoning (location, time, telephone partners, when and for how long switching phones on and off etc.), travelling behaviour, daily routines and so on. Remarkably different behaviours are tracked by Skynet. To train the algorithm, known terroristic user profiles are inserted in Skynet as a so called ground truth. Skynet now compares known terroristic profiles with newly tracked data.

In 0,008 to 0,18 % of all cases Skynet produces wrong results, so called false positives. This means innocent people are declared as terrorists. Having a number of 55 million people living in Pakistan this results in 4400 to 99.000 people mistakenly marked as terrorists and in a future scenario then killed by drones. Acceptable? War damage? Well just imagine this would be your beloved ones…

So the question isn’t just about how such learning algorithms and artificial intelligence can be improved, it’s more fundamental: Do we want software to decide over life and death? Who controls such algorithms? Secret services and governments? Are they trustworthy at all? Who is trustworthy when dealing with such a power? Or might it even be possible to “insert” moral and ethical values in AIs? How, for example, can they recognize whether someone just hoisted the white flag and gives up?

Forecast

Let’s be honest: Drones can be a huge advantage to our society. On the other hand there are multiple concerns when dealing with this technology. They are small flying computers. And computers are vulnerable to hacks. So how can drones become more secure? Moreover there is the issue with special non-fly areas and air traffic when there are more and more flying vehicles.

Wars and security issues of the future

Wars won’t stop when there are no peaceful agreements and power and greed reign the earth.

Prospectively there won’t be wars between nations but rather we’ll have asymmetric wars of individual groups such as guerilla warriors, secret services, terror organisations and hacker associations. This will constantly lead to more than 740.000 war dead.

By the use of remotely operated or autonomously acting war robots and drones and the global connection over the internet wars will accelerate – they now can be conducted over the internet.

Cyberwar

Hacking infrastructures and industrial facilities may harm whole nations and states over a longer period of time. This is called cyber war. Attackers may even not getting up from their chair.

Where does war in the web start? By sending a malicious email? How are we gonna solve this problem? How will we live with total supervision and the permanent threat of cyberwar? What are we going to do against the surgical killing of people where it is easy to eliminate contrary thoughts? How can we ensure global security? It feels like we returned to our questions in the beginning. They are still here waiting to be answered, but hopefully your awareness for all the concerns has risen.

More open questions

To be honest – an ordinary mortal like you and me – we only want to live our lives in peace and harmony. And maybe some comfort, supported by drones. But how can this be possible in such a world, in a world where so many people are so greedy and gasp for more and more power, forcing others to believe in their mindset.

Terminating this blog entry with an often quoted philosophical statement of Kant: “Be brave enough to use your mind!”. And we add: use the technical progress including drones reasonable and responsible to make this world a safer place.

Posted by Ina de Marco and Lisa Möcking.