Radical

by Sijal Aziz

  Nick stopped in front of Room 12 and held his card against the RFID scanner. The door opened with a click. Kate held her breath in anticipation, she was about to feast her eyes upon state-of-the-art computer equipment that she had never laid eyes on before.

  When the door opened and she looked inside the room, she was surprised to see that there were just two large screens in the room and a laptop. There was a customized keyboard with four joysticks in front of one of the screens. The other screen had a regular keyboard in front of it.

  Nick began “Ms. Hawkins you may know that police and local law enforcement agencies are already using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones for surveillance, bomb disposal, apprehension of terrorists and for killing terrorists on our soil and in other countries.

  Now the government wants to take drone use to the next level. The local police departments will now use specialized armed drones programmed by Kent and Cooper to carryout continuous surveillance and monitoring under the ‘Keeping It Safe’ bill. The drones to be used by the police had been fitted with live ammunitions and tasers in case the controller wants to use these weapons to immobilize or kill a criminal”

  Nick looked at Kate to make sure he had her full attention and continued, “The main justification behind the drone program is that it allows police to monitor and surveil streets all the time, because a human cannot be in all the places at all the times, so they chose drones to do their work for them.

  Since the drones will already be in the streets therefore the response time of police to deal with a particular incident will be brought down to mere seconds and if a crime occurs the police can take care of it through drones in mere seconds.

  The drones we have provided the programming services for, are state of the art vertical take off and landing drones or VTOL drones, which can lift a weight of up to 30 pounds making them excellent for mounting a surveillance camera, a bullet firing system or a gun and a taser.

  The gun on these drones have a magazine capacity of up to 50 bullets. These drones have six directional sensors making them immune against any crashes.

  The company making these drones, has finished their production and we have been testing our software on the drones. So far everything looks good. But now we want to carry out the final vulnerability testing before handing the drones to the government.

  Now remember, in order to control eight drones in eight different streets or in eight different parts of an area we will only need one police officer as a controller.

  Kent and Cooper will also provide training to the policemen who will be designated as controllers. We have already started training our first batch of officers who will control these drones at the program launch event”

  “How can one controller monitor and control eight drones?”, Kate asked.

  “The beauty of the program is that it is mostly operated by our software. The drones are programmed to fly in a predefined path based on the map coordinates that are already fed to them and do not need any input from the controller for carrying out surveillance and monitoring operations. The controller does not need to fly or control the drones, the program does it for him.

  All the controller needs to do is to be watchful all the time, just like a security guard monitoring a screen, if the controller sees a situation where intervention is required, he can make the drones chase a suspect by the push of one key and also use taser or live ammunition just by tapping a key”

  “Wouldn’t that give too much power to the police?”

  “No, it wouldn’t, the police already have guns and tasers.

  They will just be using it through drones instead of using it by hand.

  This would also mean that they will never miss a shot. Haven’t you been hearing news of police shooting down drivers and people on the street suspecting that they were reaching for their weapons. Why do you think that happens? Because the police officers fear for their lives, now with the drones, police can make the right choice, there would be no need to shoot anyone just because the policemen are thinking the suspect is reaching for their weapons. So, this program has several positives for all of us.

  Furthermore, if it is a petty criminal and no life is threatened and the perpetrator tries to run away, the controller or monitoring officer can use taser. If, however the life of a person or several people is at stake the controller can use live ammunition.

  Now your job is to test the vulnerabilities in the program and to see if it can be hacked and whether the program is delivering its outputs. Further information and checklists for the testing are in the manual. You are to tick each box in the checklist as safe or vulnerable when you start testing. You can then type your report against each element in the checklist”, Nick said and walked over to the computer desk, picked up a thick manual and handed it to Kate.

  Kate took the manual from Nick, it was very heavy and had, “Keeping it Safe: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Program Manual” written on its cover.

  “Please go through this manual carefully. It will acquaint you with the program and its outputs. Once you have gone through the manual, I want you to compile a testing plan.

  We want you to design your testing plan for both software and hardware vulnerabilities.

  The Drone Policing Software developed by Kent and Cooper consists of three main components: Firmware, Middleware and Operating System.

  The firmware runs the drones’ hardware.

  The Middleware contains flight control, weaponry, navigation and communication softwares.

  The operating system is a beauty. It makes use of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping technology or SLAM in other words, Convolution Neural Networks or CNN, the Light Detection and Ranging or LIDAR and various algorithms so that the drones do not collide with any object and learn as they operate. With our software the drones will have the artificial intelligence capacity.

  You are to conduct both whitebox and blackbox vulnerability testing on all these three components”

  Nick stopped to make sure Kate was understanding everything and then continued again, “This computer on the righthand side will show you the program layers that each component uses at different levels of operation. Remember you can only see the programs on this screen not edit them.

  While this screen is part of the ground control system, “Nick said pointing to screen with the customized keyboard in front of it, “This is the unit that the controller will use to operate and carryout different actions.

  You can make your detailed report on this laptop, “Nick said, pointing to a laptop on the left of screens.

  “What does this keyboard and joysticks do?”, Kate asked pointing to the customized keyboard with built in joysticks.

  “This keyboard is part of the ground control system. If the controller wants to give commands like pursue a suspect, fire at a suspect, use a taser or chase a vehicle, he will use the ground control system.

  These are aviator flight sticks and not joysticks. A controller can use these to manually control the drones and navigate them away from a predefined path, hover them, fire manually through these or simply bring them home to the docking and charging station. The drones are preprogrammed to go back to their dock or charging station once their batteries are about to die also. Any other questions?”

  “Not at this moment”

  “Ok. Once you are done with vulnerability testing of the program, you can test the drones and try to hack them in actual flight. For this purpose, we have set up a field-testing area in Dome C.

  Remember the software in ground control system is not editable that’s why you must make your notes on this laptop. If you find any vulnerabilities you will have to write the line number of the software program, date and time.

  Should you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me. But if you identify any vulnerabilities in the program, you have to get in contact with Mr. Cooper on this number”, Nick said handing over a visiting card to Kate, “He is available on any one of these numbers at all times for t
he drone policing software. I am off now. Should you have any questions, you can email them to me or call me anytime”

  Once Nick had left Kate, thought about what he had just said. There was a lot of information to digest, but she liked the program from the looks of it. She was good at what she did, and she was looking forward to assessing her testing skills against the program.

  Whitebox testing was Kate’s favorite testing method. In this method the tester had access to the software and could see how it worked and how the different aspects of the program integrated with each other.

  Through this method a tester was not just able to find vulnerabilities in the outputs but was also able to look at the main components of the program.

  Blackbox testing on the other hand was testing whether the program was delivering its outputs. Since blackbox testing meant that the tester could not see the actual software, so she did not have access to all the written software. Companies did that to keep their software safe so that a single tester did not have access to all the codes.

  Kate turned on the ground control system. After booting, the screen showed her what she figured was the inside of Dome C through the surveillance cameras on the drones. There were eight sections of the screen showing different parts of Dome C, which meant that there were eight drones docked on different spots within Dome C. Dome C was set up just like a regular street with props of people, vehicles, trees and buildings. She could see the take off button blinking on the keyboard. She wanted to take off the drones but thought better of it. She needed to know everything about the program before doing that.

  She then turned on the other screen. She could see various programs running even when the drones were docked. She then turned off, both the screens, sat down on the chair and started going through the manual one page at a time.

  As she read on the program became more interesting. The ground station unit was state of the art unit which provided complete control of the drones to the controller. Each ground control system contained all the components of the software but could only fly eight drones along a predefined path.

  It offered a number of options to the controller like manual flight, shooting and pursuit. The drones could all be operated at once, two or three or together through the unit.

  The manual was so interesting that Kate did not know it was 4, until Nick appeared in her office.

  Nick did not knock at the door, he simply opened the door and said, “How is it going so far?”

  Kate was startled but she did not show it, “I am half way through the ground control section. There are many programs working at different levels. This is the best case of program integration, artificial intelligence and neural networking I have ever seen”

  “So, you are ready to start compiling your testing plan now?”

  “No! It will take some time for me to go through this manual and I will only be able to design my penetration plan after I have thoroughly understood how the program works”

  “Ok. Don’t forget time is of the essence and we need this done as soon as possible. Are there any questions?”

  “No, nothing at the moment, the manual is pretty thorough. If I have any questions, I will get in touch with you”

  “Here are the copies of the documents you requested”, Nick said placing the document stack on Kate’s desk and then without another word, turned around and left the room.

  Kate went back to reading the manual and making notes in her notebook.

  By six, Kate had read as much as she could digest in one day, so she called it a day and went home.

  The traffic was unexpectedly thin at six, so she was able to reach home under half an hour.

  She took a quick shower and fixed herself a cheese sandwich for dinner. Kate then took her security card and looked at it. She couldn’t get over the excitement of working on the program. Just touching the card sent a small thrill down her spine. She was making history. The program was to define safety and security for years to come and save the lives of thousands of Americans and she was part of it.

  She went to the study, turned on her laptop and logged into her account at Hackers Anonymous.

  Hackers Anonymous was a group of 20 white hat hackers who provided penetration services to large corporations.

  Only the best coders in the world were part of the group.

  The vetting process for joining the group consisted of a number of ‘dare assignment’ that a new recruit had to take on before he or she could join the group.

  The dare assignments were designed by the group to assess whether a hacker was able to penetrate into a software. A person became eligible for joining the group after he or she had successfully penetrated into five out of the seven programs in the assignments. Kate completed all of the seven assignments and was invited to join the group as an elite member.

  She was known around the hackers’ world as ‘Shiansi24’. Fellow hackers respected her for her knowledge and ability. No one in the group used their real names and nobody knew who they were working with. The group never undertook illegal assignments.

  The members of the group got paid by big corporations for testing their softwares for vulnerabilities.

  For Kate the main pull to the assignments was the thrill she got from breaking into a program and testing her wits against coders who had designed the software.

  There were no new assignments available for her, so she logged out again.

  She turned off her laptop and tried to go to sleep but was unable to since there were several questions in her mind about drones. If she was to do vulnerability testing for a UAV program, she needed to know more about drones. So, she started researching drones on her phone.

  She started with the basic search, ‘what are drones’ on google. Kate was surprised to find out that the idea of drones was not a modern concept, in fact the Australians launched an unmanned bomb, filled with balloons back in mid 1800s to attack Venice. Different countries were toying with the idea of drones for the past century.

  United States depended heavily on drones and within United States, the Military and CIA were running two different UAV programs.

  The military was running an overt program, meaning that it operated with the knowledge of the government or public. The overt program was mostly carried out in the areas where the US troops were stationed.

  The CIA’s program on the other hand was clandestine. Missions performed by the CIA’s UAV program did not necessarily occur where US troops were stationed.

  The CIA mostly used the drones for spying purposes and taking out targets it deemed dangerous to the security of the United States.

  The government was also thinking of granting various companies drone usage licenses for research and development purposes. Amazon was trying to get a license to use drones as couriers.

  Drone applications and advancement in the US military were mind blowing. The US Navy was running a Locust program, the Air Force was running the Gremlins program and now working on a far advanced program, ‘Perdix’.

  The fighter planes were testing drone chaff instead of regular aluminum and glass chaff. The drone applications in the military were staggering and Kent and Cooper was making billions working as a pioneer in the drone software technologies and ground control system hardware technologies.

  Kate then did some research on the Keeping it Safe program. The bill was two pronged.

  First part of the program addressed concerns like armed drones being hacked, netted and falling off the sky.

  Second part of the program laid out the benefits to be garnered from the program and rules to be followed.

  The Keeping it Safe bill had lingered in the congress for about 6 years before being approved after Stephen Paddock opened fire and killed 58 people and wounded 422.

  Since Paddock had hauled a number of guns into his room in Las Vegas, the supporters of the bill claimed that if the streets were being surveilled, he could have been caught for suspicious activity.

  They also maintaine
d that since he was shooting through the window, the drones could have shot him much sooner than the police did in that incident. The bill also caught the eye of those in favor of the second amendment since it meant nobody would be protesting for gun control as the shooting incidents would be controlled through the use of drones. The National Rifle Association backed the bill with all its resources in both media and through the lobbyists. So, the supporters for the Keeping it Safe bill grew by staggering numbers.

  The bill passed in early 2017 under the Trump administration and it took Kent and Cooper nearly two years of work to develop the program and bring it to the vulnerability testing phase, which was the last phase before the delivery of any program developed by Kent and Cooper.

  Kate wondered how people did their research before the internet. She had gotten more information within an hour, just by lying down in her bed and using her phone that would have taken anyone months before the dawn of the internet.

  Sometime during her research Kate fell asleep. She dreamt that she was being chased in a field by drones and her boss Alexander Cooper was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then Mark appeared out of nowhere and saved her from the drones.

  Kate woke up breathing hard. She checked the time on her cellphone. It was 4:30 AM. She got off the bed and made her way to the kitchen and drank a glass of water to calm down the breathing. Then she went back to a dreamless sleep.

  Kate was up before her alarm went off. She did her usual morning workout, took a quick shower and drove to her office.

  After reaching Floor A, she handed her phone to the receptionist and got the numbered card in return She made her way to the security gate, put her purse in the x-ray scanner, swiped her card and made her way through the security gate and went straight to her newly assigned office. Kate was getting used to the security routine.

  Once in the office, she went back to the manual. She continued reading it and making her notes on the laptop as she read along. She finished the manual by 3 and had lunch at the office canteen. She was hoping to find Alison at the canteen but since it was Alison was not around.