PassIve degradatIon attacks

The traditional approach to discussing this problem is usually split into two separate discussions, one dealing with technical Electronic Warfare measures against sensor equipment and another dealing with deceptions aimed at operators and imagery analysts or interpreters. This way of looking at the problem is increasingly problematic, with increasing levels of automation in ISR systems, especially in terms of automated cueing operators or analysts to items of interest in the ISR picture. Where do we draw the line between ‘technological’ deceptions aimed at automated machinery in ISR versus the human ‘wetware’ of the ISR system user? A much more general approach to this problem is to look at the deceptive measures in the framework of the four canonical strategies of IW (refer previous NCW101) and identify whether the deception is targeted at the ISR sensor/system’s capability to gather raw data or its capability to interpret the raw data, accepting that the intended victim may be a piece of hardware, software and/or wetware. In effect, we look at the victim’s networked system as a system, rather than its disparate parts. ISR systems today can be broadly divided into radar based, passive (RF) radio-frequency based and electro-optical (EO) based systems, often fused with geographical or other databases intended to aid interpretation and further exploitation. A radar based system may involve the use of imaging 2D or even 3D synthetic aperture radar, inverse-synthetic aperture radar, narrowband or ultra-wideband radar, earth and foliage penetrating radar, ground, air or maritime moving target indicator radar using DPCA techniques, or pulse Doppler radar. Some of these radars produce imagery of areas or objects, and some produce coordinate, kinematic and often identification data for targets as outputs. Many modern radars can interleave these modes and fuse the outputs into a single situational picture, containing imagery output, kinematic and ident parameters for targets. This increasingly creates vulnerabilities for a sophisticated attacker to exploit. Passive RF sensors will typically locate a threat emitter with some accuracy, and identify it with the most sophisticated systems capable of accurate geolocation and ‘fingerprinting’ of specific pieces of emitter equipment, based on production tolerance caused variations in signal format. EO sensors vary widely in effective range, sensitivity, resolution, and may operate in visible, near Infrared / shortwave, mid-Infrared / midwave and far infrared / longwave bands, or if a hyperspectral sensor, it may operate over dozens or even hundreds of bands. Imagers may be framing cameras, video cameras and pushbroom stripmappers or linescanners.