Re: Don't trust the net too much
| > hundered dollars worth of transmitter parts, you can cause transient | > failures with EMF pulse weapons, and for a bit more, you can fry all | > the electronics, then drive away before they have any idea that their | worth of parts. Could you be more specific? | > Go read Winn Schwartaus book "Information Warfare" Then go | > read Sun Tzu. | | I have. I agree, killing people is dumb, but try telling that to your More specifically, few items sensitive electronic items are hardened against electromagnetic pulses. Ever see a speaker interfere with your TV set? Build a big enough speaker, and you can screw with your computers memory. (Of course, if you just use an electromagnet, and not bother to build a speaker around it, you'll be much more energy efficient. :) A big enough pulse can confuse just about any hardware; bigger pulses still can destroy it. Directed (or undirected) pulses are easy to produce with the right amps. Again, check out Schwartau; your local library probably has him. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty I Support The Phil of any kind is lost all at Zimmermann legal defense fund once." -Hume http://www.netresponse.com/zldf ------------------ PGP.ZIP Part [001/713] ------------------- M4$L#!!0````(`">9ZQX3(*,_DG8!`-JF`P`'````4$=0+D581>S;=UQ3U__X M\9M!$E8,TT@PJ$10$1=*41%WW`KX$=Q[M5KK`&R%(HH+(T.M"S>NME8K=31N M:A$[K+5(K:O5BE405ZE:1"3?UTW`:K_]\/G\?O_^?CX>3^_-S;GGO,^\`^@W ------------------------------------------------------------- for next chunk to export --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/export/
Adam Shostack writes:
More specifically, few items sensitive electronic items are hardened against electromagnetic pulses. Ever see a speaker interfere with your TV set?
Thats because electrons flying along long free paths in the vacuum of your picture tube are easy to move off of path. However, I'll point out that magnetic fields are always generated by dipoles and fall off very fast with time. I'll also point out that you'd need a damn powerful field to do the following:
Build a big enough speaker, and you can screw with your computers memory.
I'd have to hear very, very powerful evidence that this was possible, especially at a distance. Perry
Adam Shostack writes:
More specifically, few items sensitive electronic items are hardened against electromagnetic pulses. Ever see a speaker interfere with your TV set?
Thats because electrons flying along long free paths in the vacuum of your picture tube are easy to move off of path. However, I'll point out that magnetic fields are always generated by dipoles and fall off very fast with time. I'll also point out that you'd need a damn powerful field to do the following:
Build a big enough speaker, and you can screw with your computers memory.
I'd have to hear very, very powerful evidence that this was possible, especially at a distance.
Perry
For people interested in electromagnetic fields, TEMPEST, emanations, crashing computers, and electronics eavesdropping: Go see Winn Schwartau talk about HERF guns sometime. He passed around a picture of a device for < US$500 that could crash any computer within 50 yards.. Then again, it isn't too good for the person firing the gun either.. (mega EM emissions). The parts are available if you know what to get. a VERY enlightening and frightening presentation. I don't think he personally has built one. His presentation contained a presentation on TEMPEST emissions, and low level EM field effects on sensitive equipment problems too (a PBS documentary - a VERY compelling presentation of why you should never use walkman/CD players/radios/electronics equipment on airplanes if they say not to, and you value your life) Obviously, the further you get away, the faster the field decays, so range to target is important. Then again, the US purportedly used a kind of HERF bomb against Iraqi telecommunications bunkers during the Persian Gulf war. (No I don't have any references about this, but it shouldn't be that hard to verify). -- ____________________________________________________________________________ Doug Hughes Engineering Network Services System/Net Admin Auburn University doug@eng.auburn.edu "Real programmers use cat > file.as"
Doug Hughes writes:
Go see Winn Schwartau talk about HERF guns sometime. He passed around a picture of a device for < US$500 that could crash any computer within 50 yards.
If it costs that little, I'd like to see one demonstrated. I've heard of no demonstrations of such things. .pm
Hmm.. I'm not sure I'd want to stand too close when one of those things goes off, but it would be an interesting demo. :) Maybe behind an EM shield.. ;) I think there was a question of some microelectronics being permenently damaged because of fusion at the MOS level (burning through the gate), so it might have to be a disposable machine in a place where no other machines are near. It would depend on the magnitude of the charge (and hence cost of the weapon). It might take a very expensive one to do this, or maybe not... -- ____________________________________________________________________________ Doug Hughes Engineering Network Services System/Net Admin Auburn University doug@eng.auburn.edu "Real programmers use cat > file.as"
Doug Hughes writes:
Hmm.. I'm not sure I'd want to stand too close when one of those things goes off, but it would be an interesting demo. :)
Maybe behind an EM shield.. ;)
What is it, exactly, that you imagine could happen to you? You realize that you can expose humans to pretty powerful electromagnetic fields without any noticable effect unless the frequency happens to be one that their tissues absorb.
I think there was a question of some microelectronics being permenently damaged because of fusion at the MOS level (burning through the gate),
To do that requires that you transfer energy from your device into the computer you are attacking. How do you propose to do that? .pm
Doug Hughes writes:
Hmm.. I'm not sure I'd want to stand too close when one of those things goes off, but it would be an interesting demo. :)
Maybe behind an EM shield.. ;)
What is it, exactly, that you imagine could happen to you? You realize that you can expose humans to pretty powerful electromagnetic fields without any noticable effect unless the frequency happens to be one that their tissues absorb.
I'm thinking better safe than sorry. None of the studies on EM fields and their effects on humans are causal, but a lot of studies and advice have concluded that caution and minimization may be advisable. It's the un-noticable effects that I'm worried about. ;)
I think there was a question of some microelectronics being permenently damaged because of fusion at the MOS level (burning through the gate),
To do that requires that you transfer energy from your device into the computer you are attacking. How do you propose to do that?
Just relating what I thought I'd heard. It may be wrong, or I may be remembering it wrong. My EM theory is a bit rusty. -- ____________________________________________________________________________ Doug Hughes Engineering Network Services System/Net Admin Auburn University doug@eng.auburn.edu "Real programmers use cat > file.as"
On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Doug Hughes writes:
I think there was a question of some microelectronics being permenently damaged because of fusion at the MOS level (burning through the gate),
To do that requires that you transfer energy from your device into the computer you are attacking. How do you propose to do that?
airburst? :) Ben.
.pm tolled:
Doug Hughes writes:
Go see Winn Schwartau talk about HERF guns sometime. He passed around a picture of a device for < US$500 that could crash any computer within 50 yards.
If it costs that little, I'd like to see one demonstrated. I've heard of no demonstrations of such things.
.pm
Hey, if someone will point me at some (free) plans, I'll build one and hold a demonstration. (I've got an old XT, a 286, a 3B1, and some monitors I'd like to blow up, and I've not yet blown up a pc using HERF yet (thermite--yes, HE--done it, lN2--yep, but not HREF.) --doug ayen@access.digex.net
On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Doug Hughes wrote:
Go see Winn Schwartau talk about HERF guns sometime. He passed around a picture of a device for < US$500 that could crash any computer within 50 yards.. Then again, it isn't too good for the person firing the gun either.. (mega EM emissions).
That all depends on the power level, and the emission pattern of the device, and the frequency. I've been working within 10 feet of a dipole being fed by a 1kW amplifier before, and it didn't make me sterile (but it might've loosened a filling or two <grin>).
The parts are available if you know what to get. a VERY enlightening and frightening presentation. I don't think he personally has built one. His presentation contained a presentation on TEMPEST emissions, and low level EM field effects on sensitive equipment problems too (a PBS documentary - a VERY compelling presentation of why you should never use walkman/CD players/radios/electronics equipment on airplanes if they say not to, and you value your life)
This sounds like absolute propoganda. If you do the calculations, you'll see that a 1 watt transmitter sitting 100 feet away from your target will generate an EMF less than that 1000kW ERP TV transmitter array you just flew over. If aircraft avionics were *that* sensitive, we'd have planes falling out of the sky, and we don't. Add to that the HF and VHF transmitting equipment in the cockpit, plus the microwave ovens in the fore and aft, PLUS the phones they have on the plane, and it adds up to a sizeable amount of RF bouncing around the cabin without you and your 2m talkie with it's 6 dB loss rubber duckie. Now, if every passenger fired up their 2m talkies, that might pose a problem, but then again every passenger wouldn't be using one, would they? Again, sounds like "we want to totally control your environment for your safety (actually, to minimize our liability)" crap. -- Ed Carp, N7EKG Ed.Carp@linux.org, ecarp@netcom.com 801/534-8857 voicemail 801/460-1883 digital pager Finger ecarp@netcom.com for PGP 2.5 public key an88744@anon.penet.fi Q. What's the trouble with writing an MS-DOS program to emulate Clinton? A. Figuring out what to do with the other 639K of memory.
On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Doug Hughes wrote:
Go see Winn Schwartau talk about HERF guns sometime. He passed around a picture of a device for < US$500 that could crash any computer within 50 yards.. Then again, it isn't too good for the person firing the gun either.. (mega EM emissions).
That all depends on the power level, and the emission pattern of the device, and the frequency. I've been working within 10 feet of a dipole being fed by a 1kW amplifier before, and it didn't make me sterile (but it might've loosened a filling or two <grin>).
Agree!
The parts are available if you know what to get. a VERY enlightening and frightening presentation. I don't think he personally has built one. His presentation contained a presentation on TEMPEST emissions, and low level EM field effects on sensitive equipment problems too (a PBS documentary - a VERY compelling presentation of why you should never use walkman/CD players/radios/electronics equipment on airplanes if they say not to, and you value your life)
This sounds like absolute propoganda. If you do the calculations, you'll see that a 1 watt transmitter sitting 100 feet away from your target will generate an EMF less than that 1000kW ERP TV transmitter array you just flew over. If aircraft avionics were *that* sensitive, we'd have planes falling out of the sky, and we don't. Add to that the HF and VHF transmitting equipment in the cockpit, plus the microwave ovens in the fore and aft, PLUS the phones they have on the plane, and it adds up to a sizeable amount of RF bouncing around the cabin without you and your 2m talkie with it's 6 dB loss rubber duckie.
Now, if every passenger fired up their 2m talkies, that might pose a problem, but then again every passenger wouldn't be using one, would they?
Again, sounds like "we want to totally control your environment for your safety (actually, to minimize our liability)" crap.
If you saw that PBS documentary (they want $20,000 for rebroadcast by the way). It was an 87 or 88 or something like that. It would make you a believer. There was a lady in a van that whenever she used her cellular phone, her sun's breathing apparatus (lung impaired) went into alarm. There was another case at a hospital pre-natal care word near the main entrance to the hospital. Several occasions when a local bus loop went by, and the guy happened to be talking on the intercom of the bus, several of the units in the ward went into alarm and failed (they had a tough time tracking that one down by the way). Wheel chairs for handicapped people were sensitive. They held a cellular phone about a foot from a wheel chair control and it started spinning around and generally going out of control. (The guy's wheel chair had gone out of control and run him off a heavy slope once and he almost died. it was unproven whether it was electromagnetic or just a defect). This just goes to show that we live in a world of electromagnetic soup. We really don't know how it effects the body long term, or whether, having more mission or life critical electronics could be interacting with over devices. This was the theme of the program. Another example was on an airplane (several of them.. older ones mostly I believe) pilots would occassionally lose instruments (VLS, etc) when passengers would activate portable transistor radios and such. Particularly radios.. But there was another case involving a portable computer.. These cases have been documented. It's a good thing the plain wasn't on a landing approach during a storm, or things could've gone very bad very quickly. I heard about the portable computer via a different source. The guy kept turning his computer on. The instruments would do a little dance. The captain would tell the stewardess, she would tell the passenger, he would turn it off for a while. Then, he would turn it on and repeat.. Until finally he refused to turn it off, so they confiscated it and returned it at the end of the trip. Urban Legend? maybe.. Believe what you want, but investigate the reports before dissmissing it out of hand as propaganda. I'd rather stay alive than rely on "theoretically it shouldn't matter." :) Keep in mind that newer planes (767, 757) let you do anything you want while the plane is in flight (but now while landing or takeoff), so they probably build better instrumentation and cabin shielding into the planes these days. If they say keep it off, chances are they have a good reason.. If you find categorical evidence to the contrary, I'm sure I would be very relieved to see it posted here. (rather than wondering if somebody in one of the 30 rows ahead of me might decide he knows better) Disclaimer: I have absolutely no idea what kind of shielding goes into an airplane nor any knowledge of building practices in the airline industry, but that should be obvious. ;) Well, I've posted enough on this, and I don't have any evidence besides what I've seen and what I've heard from others. For all I know the entire documentary was botched (it was shown on an evening newsmagazine in the late 80's hosted by Connie Chung - British documentary). Now back to your regularly scheduled mailing list already in progress. -- ____________________________________________________________________________ Doug Hughes Engineering Network Services System/Net Admin Auburn University doug@eng.auburn.edu "Real programmers use cat > file.as"
Doug Hughes writes:
If you saw that PBS documentary (they want $20,000 for rebroadcast by the way). It was an 87 or 88 or something like that. It would make you a believer. There was a lady in a van that whenever she used her cellular phone, her sun's breathing apparatus (lung impaired) went into alarm. There was another case at a hospital pre-natal care word near the main entrance to the hospital. Several occasions when a local bus loop went by, and the guy happened to be talking on the intercom of the bus, several of the units in the ward went into alarm and failed (they had a tough time tracking that one down by the way).
There is a huge difference between noting that some electronic equipment is temporarily vulnerable to interference, or that you can read screens at a distance from the emitted radiation, and saying that you can build these portable ray-guns that cause computers to fry at 200 yards. .pm
On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Doug Hughes wrote:
This just goes to show that we live in a world of electromagnetic soup. We really don't know how it effects the body long term, or whether, having more mission or life critical electronics could be interacting with over devices. This was the theme of the program.
There have been many examples of this - several cases of hams having their pacemakers go nuts when they keyed their transmitters, etc. But that doesn't mean that aviation avionics are sensitive - in fact, devices that are specifically designed to receive RF of a specific frequency are usually designed to reject RF of a different frequency, especially type accepted radios (the avionics package is required to be type accepted for that particular class of service, which includes spurious rejection, intermod products down XX dB, etc.)
Another example was on an airplane (several of them.. older ones mostly I believe) pilots would occassionally lose instruments (VLS, etc) when passengers would activate portable transistor radios and such. Particularly radios.. But there was another case involving a portable computer.. These cases have been documented. It's a good thing the plain wasn't on a landing approach during a storm, or things could've gone very bad very quickly.
A transistor radio puts out such a minute amount of RF (at 455 KHz and/or 10.7 MHz, the IF freqs of the radio) that most insturments designed to pick up RF can't detect this stuff from more than a few feet away. FCC regulations say that if your avionics is being interfered with, it's YOUR problem, not the guy that just turned on his radio. If someone's avionics is being interfered when I turn on an AM/FM transistor radio, then I'd say that he either needs to get his avionics fixed, or he's using illegal consumer-grade radios (which are usually junk anyway - even much ham radio gear is garbage, unfortunately), instead of the type-accepted stuff he's supposed to be using. I'd be interested in finding out more about this guy and his "VLS-jumped-when-someone-turned-on-their-radio" story.
I heard about the portable computer via a different source. The guy kept turning his computer on. The instruments would do a little dance. The captain would tell the stewardess, she would tell the passenger, he would turn it off for a while. Then, he would turn it on and repeat.. Until finally he refused to turn it off, so they confiscated it and returned it at the end of the trip. Urban Legend? maybe..
The early laptop computers would put out an amazing amount of crap. I used to have a Zenith laptop, and when I'd turn the thing on, it'd throw out junk that I could hear on every radio in the house, including the 2m FM stuff, the HF rig, and I could even hear it out in my car on the 2m mobile! I can believe it, but that's no excuse for just saying, "well, let's just ban all of it..."
Believe what you want, but investigate the reports before dissmissing it out of hand as propaganda. I'd rather stay alive than rely on "theoretically it shouldn't matter." :)
My point is, it's not your, nor my responsibility to refrain from using our radios - it's the responsibility of the avionics people to make sure that their radios are within spec and are kept that way. If they don't bother, that's not my fault.
Keep in mind that newer planes (767, 757) let you do anything you want while the plane is in flight (but now while landing or takeoff), so they probably build better instrumentation and cabin shielding into the planes these days. If they say keep it off, chances are they have a good reason..
Again, my contention is that they don't.
If you find categorical evidence to the contrary, I'm sure I would be very relieved to see it posted here. (rather than wondering if somebody in one of the 30 rows ahead of me might decide he knows better)
The ng rec.radio.amateur.misc might have some additional stuff in the FAQ, and the ARRL certainly has a mountain of information on this - I'll poke around. 'echo help|Mail info@arrl.org' might yield some interesting things... -- Ed Carp, N7EKG Ed.Carp@linux.org, ecarp@netcom.com 801/534-8857 voicemail 801/460-1883 digital pager Finger ecarp@netcom.com for PGP 2.5 public key an88744@anon.penet.fi Q. What's the trouble with writing an MS-DOS program to emulate Clinton? A. Figuring out what to do with the other 639K of memory.
On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Doug Hughes wrote:
Keep in mind that newer planes (767, 757) let you do anything you want while the plane is in flight (but now while landing or takeoff), so they probably build better instrumentation and cabin shielding into the planes these days. If they say keep it off, chances are they have a good reason..
If you find categorical evidence to the contrary, I'm sure I would be very relieved to see it posted here. (rather than wondering if somebody in one of the 30 rows ahead of me might decide he knows better)
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no idea what kind of shielding goes into an airplane nor any knowledge of building practices in the airline industry, but that should be obvious. ;)
In the Canadian CFS (Canada Flight Supplement), a manual distributed to all Canadian pilots and continuously updated, there is a section on this kind of thing. The basic gist of it is that there is no proof that computers and cells cause interference, tests have proved inconclusive, but there is suspicion. Then, of course, is a silly little form that you are supposed to fill out if you ever have such a problem. As for cells, a collegue (with his Commercial rating, was going for an Airline Transport Rating) swore up and down that cells do nothing, and that the only reason there are phones on airplanes is because with a standard cell you can phone just about anywhere locally because of the range an air-ground connection would have a 30,000'. The plane phones are supposed to have some sort of device that uses the local cell and forces you to pay LD charges. Whether it is true or not.... But anyway, aircraft instruments operate in just about all bandwiths (HF, VHF, UHF mainly, with VHF being very popular.) Sean o-------------------o----------------------o-----------------------o | Sean Walberg, | Tech Support | Pas_al, _obol, BASI_, | | sean@escape.ca | escape communication | PostS_ript, T_L... | | Mail for PGP key | 925-4290 | C fills all the holes | o----------------] http://www.escape.ca/~sean [--------------------o
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Ed Carp said:
This sounds like absolute propoganda. If you do the calculations, you'll see that a 1 watt transmitter sitting 100 feet away from your target will generate an EMF less than that 1000kW ERP TV transmitter array you just flew over. If aircraft avionics were *that* sensitive, we'd have planes falling out of the sky, and we don't.
Oh, yes-- we do. The Army lost a small number (two or three) of of UH-60 Black Hawks in crashes where the flight control system suddenly commanded extreme pitch or attitude changes. Why? In all the crash cases, EMI from nearby TV or FM transmitters was found to be the proximate cause. The Army, and Sikorsky, immediately went to work to better shield the FCS from EMI. It's interesting to note that the Navy's SH-60, a UH-60 variant, was designed from the start to be EMI-immune. Ships' radars operate in the 10-100kW range, and that's a lot of EMI when you're landing 15-20m away from the radar mast. - -Paul - -- Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG | Do you support free speech even when you don't perobich@ingr.com | like what's being said? Be a cryptography user. Ask me how. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBMAQLM6fb4pLe9tolAQF9NgQAvwOl00o+zwfEsOXClVUgJ8odeHjq5B/Z +2O8pHo04cSin0wwsrRqdu/3XOwQ6UZpZmw/cnxBglZOnTwVvtoTkb/ZpYhPZr94 6tbnCCMxUb4W/Yiqz4sJ/AF4afxkyn6N9h8U0Hg86vkhYprTqIWL00/k1LDWkQOg XhpWLcci/vg= =LLsp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Wed, 12 Jul 1995, Paul Robichaux wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Ed Carp said:
This sounds like absolute propoganda. If you do the calculations, you'll see that a 1 watt transmitter sitting 100 feet away from your target will generate an EMF less than that 1000kW ERP TV transmitter array you just flew over. If aircraft avionics were *that* sensitive, we'd have planes falling out of the sky, and we don't.
Oh, yes-- we do. The Army lost a small number (two or three) of of UH-60 Black Hawks in crashes where the flight control system suddenly commanded extreme pitch or attitude changes. Why? In all the crash cases, EMI from nearby TV or FM transmitters was found to be the proximate cause. The Army, and Sikorsky, immediately went to work to better shield the FCS from EMI.
It's interesting to note that the Navy's SH-60, a UH-60 variant, was designed from the start to be EMI-immune. Ships' radars operate in the 10-100kW range, and that's a lot of EMI when you're landing 15-20m away from the radar mast.
Well, I was speaking of commercial aircraft, not military, but the point is taken. I haven't had occasion to use my packet radio lashup on a UH-60 -- yet ;) -- Ed Carp, N7EKG Ed.Carp@linux.org, ecarp@netcom.com 801/534-8857 voicemail 801/460-1883 digital pager Finger ecarp@netcom.com for PGP 2.5 public key an88744@anon.penet.fi Q. What's the trouble with writing an MS-DOS program to emulate Clinton? A. Figuring out what to do with the other 639K of memory.
participants (8)
-
Adam Shostack -
Doug Ayen -
Doug Hughes -
Ed Carp [khijol Sysadmin] -
paul＠poboy.b17c.ingr.com -
Perry E. Metzger -
Rev. Ben -
Sean A. Walberg