FLR Field Issues
 

Hey everyone,

I know this is nothing more than speculation, but it's extremely fishy. While our team was at the Finger Lake Regional in New York, several teams had their robots suddenly act erratically during teleop, sometimes in a very suspicious manner.

For example, team 843 and Sab-BOT-tage all had their robots act oddly. One of them even had their robot completely out of their control, as in, it kept playing the game correctly during teleop without any hands on the controls. The other two teams had similar encounters. When the robots started to act strangely, things like spontaneous minibot deployment occurred, as if someone was trying to figure out their controls.

In addition to that, our robot at one point lost the link to FMS just as the match started, and then magically gained it back immediately when the match ended. During this time, we found out their last reading for our battery was 3 volts, and when we checked, it was actually still charged to 10 volts, so an underpowered bridge is most likely not the issue.

All of this happened to the red side only on Friday. What do you all think of this? Out of control robots that can still play the game are hardly the result of field or user error.

EDIT: I don't know why I would have suspected hacking. Forget about that and think more about what else could cause these issues.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I don't think you should be too quick to jump to malicious intent. There could be dozens of reasons for what went on and the interpretations of the status indicators and/or movements (or lack-of) of the robots on the playing fields.

I know it's frustrating for teams when something they can't logically explain or figure out happens. It's happened to me before and it sure will happen again in the future but I don't think that malicious intent would have been involved in any of these scenarios.

Perhaps if the teams that were having these issues on each of their robots could more thoroughly explain what went on then perhaps we could have a better inside into the problem(s) and if any solutions came of them.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

i dont think all teams really beleive in honorable play. in our 2008 regional, our leftside motor plugs were suspiciously disengaged while the team was at lunch costing us the quarterfinal round. the refs told us it was probably a stray ball, but seeing as how our electrical board and indeed the inside of our robot was protected by blueberry netting i found that a little hard to swallow. BUT, nothing could be proven, it was just dissapointing.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

It's more than a little disappointing people are so quick to blame. I guessed it's human nature.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Perhaps some one was able to drive it off their iphone?

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Perhaps. But I don't think you should jump straight to someone causing some foul play. It's technology and sometimes it has its own mind.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I think you guys all have a pretty severe misunderstanding of technology if you think this is possible.

First - aren't robot communications WPA encrypted?

Second - why would they target you and not the teams in the run for winning the event?

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

are you sure that it was not a glitch that was causing multiple robots to be controlled by one driver station, like, team 1, 2, and 3 all being controlled by team 1's driver station. that would be my guess as to the culprit.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I was only joking about the Iphone thing, It is always funny when we practice and the drivers suddenly lose control and one of our coaches takes over driving and everyone is so lost lol.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

1.
All you need is enough packets -- of which you will get plenty from a robot.

2. It could just be someone entertaining themselves more than trying to ruin a winning team.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

That's really only useful for WEP. The FRC bridge is encrypted with WPA, which is really only cracked through brute force, which, within the period of a single regional, is really not feasible (unless you get really, really lucky).

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Edit: ditto, rahilm

WPA2 security, as used by FIRST, has no known weaknesses, meaning that there no methods better than brute force for obtaining a key. WEP has critical weaknesses which can be exploited by the software you mention, but FIRST doesn't use WEP, nor should anybody else.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

This is highly unlikely. The field controls have real time status updates on communication between controller and robot. Had alarms been raised by the FTA, the match would have likely been re-run. Not knowing any details on the field side, I can only guess that there was no cause for concern according to the FTA.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

10 volts (which is really, really low btw) at idle could certainly drop to 3 volts when you start actually driving.

Here's an alternate theory:
-The 10V robot started the match, and as soon as the drivers engaged the power-hungry main motors, the voltage dropped so low the various voltage regulators couldn't keep the cRio and bridge functional
-The 2011 bridge takes about 90 seconds to reboot in our timing
-By the time the bridge rebooted and reconnected to FMS, the match was over.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Yea, 10 volts is a depleted battery, NOT a charged battery.

Don't EVER play with a 10v battery...

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

We were seeded fourth so we were in the running for winning the event.
And apparently something fishy was going on. Our team leader said someone was in our pits and may have been messing with our bumpers and left a note on our robot . He contacted the volunteer co-ordinator to sort it out.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Don't discount the idea of someone remotely controlling a robot by iPhone /iPad. There are two free iOS apps called DSLite and IAMDriver which CAN drive a robot. It is not out of the question.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Hacking WPA2 seems tremedously unlikely.

Robots dying mid-match only to come back on after a while is likely because, unlike last year's radio, this year's bridge has a long reboot time for even momentary power losses.

Last year, a momentary power loss means a stuttering robot control. This year, it means a dead robot for most of a match.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

DSLite would still require the iPhone to have the wireless key and iAMdriver only works if you're using the iAMdriver control system instead of the cRIO.

Not true, within the last year a vulnerability was disconvered in the WPA2 spec known as Hole196. However it doesn't help in finding the key only helps you do nefarious things once you know it.

Also there is really no need to brute force the key, it would be far easier to just take the pieces of paper that have the wireless keys written on them. Many of the competitions I've been at teams will leave the paper they're given with the key just laying around their pit. In the frantic pace of the event no one would likely notice if it went missing.

All of that being said I have significant doubts that there was a malicious person at FLR remotely controlling robots. I've seen many robots do weird things over the years due to low batteries, bad wiring, faulty programming, etc. We build very complex machines and when they don't function as expected it can be frustrating. However there should be a lot of thought given before anyone makes accusations of cheating.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Agreed! At WPI this last year 1915 (1519's practice robot) lost a key match as I couldn't control the robot since the voltage was dropping down to 10 volts which caused erratic and uncontrolled behavior.

Also check your controls and code!

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

While it's hard to not blame the FMS connection with the robot for being consistently pathetic as it has in years past (waiting for 3 hours in the stands to connect for a match), one unfortunate thing I have come to know in the last three years of FIRST is that not all of the thousands of teams go about competition the "right" way.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Also we found that before each match, the driver station computer should be restarted and booted up only in the driver account. this prevents any other programs from running. we has issues with the developer account which when started up didn't always shut down processes.

We saw very similar behavior to what was described here...


...maybe Anonymous is coming after FIRST...
;)

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I realize that 10 volts is low (someone on our team put the wrong tag on it), but it was a little unusual to see a robot lose connection right at the beginning and regain it immediately when the match ends.

To everyone else, I know the hacking theory is a bit out there, and it is possible FMS was being a total butthead of a system. On the first day of practice matches they almost made us switch to the 2009-2010 gaming adapters because the field failed to connect to the new ones for a good 8 hours.

Of course, it turned out that the wifi in the gym there was interfering with FMS.

And to anyone who was at FLR, I really hope none of you tried to connect to the "Free Publlic Wifi" adhoc network.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Two points here, first, as mentioned earlier at 10V it would be very easy for the startup current of a robot coming to life to cause the radio to suddenly lose power, and the radios restart and reconnect time is roughly the span of a match. Its not unusual at all, it's somewhat expected. Plus a battery at 10V after robot start is probably very near dead and is giving you 'false hope' readings because its under very little load. I can understand why at first glance, this doesn't seem to be a problem, but I assure you it is a problem.

Second point, I've seen wireless networks with 20+ computers on them, actively operating in very close proximity for months at a time (ever see what happens on a college campus?) with no interference problems. The WiFi system employed by the field and robots should not succumb to the presence of one local ad-hoc network, it would never have been so successful in the household market.

Unfortunately I think at this point you guys have to suspect a problem on your end, I know it's not pleasant. I've been in the shoes of "it couldn't possibly be our fault, the field/wifi/arena/other team is messing with us" but I can assure you every single time the culprit has been less sinister. I urge you to take this experience and try to fine tune out any bugs in your system, and do whatever you can to make it more robust. This is the first contact for many of these systems and weird, new bugs are expected.

Matt

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

The volunteers at an event work with limited data. Calling them out for making you switch controllers is pointless. If you want to check every level of a problem do it yourself, if you want your robot working as quickly as possible cut some corners.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

This.

I am almost 100% sure this is the cause of your issues. Many of the components in the electrical system do funky things under low voltage, especially the jaguars and radios. Charge your batteries, you were playing on a dead battery which is never a good idea.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Uhhh... I'm not sure he was calling them out, I read it more as a "The field was acting up and they were trying some crazy things out of desperation". Also, cutting corners? I'd never advise a team to do that, it never actually saves any time.

Matt

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I was indeed saying this. Their theory was that the 5v radios FIRST supplied were too underpowered to be reached by FMS, which I personally didn't believe. They ended up not switching to the old radios, because the problem was indeed fixed by RIT shutting down their wifi access points (there were like 20 of them in there). The volunteers did the best they could with what they had.

As for the battery thing, I'm aware that it was likely the cause of the issue. I just mentioned it because the robot didn't seem to power down, though I now realize the bridge probably died on its own.

And once again I mention that someone on our team mistakenly marked that battery as charged, and we didn't have time to check it before we queued.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I didn't mean to sound harsh, sorry if I did, I just wanted to make it clear that as much as it might seem helpful to blame the evil forces of the field/etc, its only going to lead to more stress later. I hope you have a good season, and remember every time something breaks, it's a learning experience ::ouch::

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

We were doing some testing with last year's robot today, and it's in pretty hurting shape. Even with a full battery, some very weird stuff can happen due to motors stalling. It is configured as a long-base 4WD tank drive with grippy wheels on front, slick wheels on back, and riding on carpet. Clearly, this configuration is really bad at turning.

Example of weirdness:
When we move the joystick full left or right, the robot sometimes shoots forward or backwards. We eventually figured that this was because one of the motors would trip its fuse while trying to turn, and the other one would then power the robot full-speed forward or backwards, depending on your direction of turn. So it ends looks like something un-commanded is happening, when in fact it's an interaction of the underpowered battery, fuses, and environment.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

This configuration should have no trouble turning unless it is direct driven by CIMS.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Everyone knows that every event does not get finished without a couple unsolved issues. One of those issues at the FLR was the few events were some robots seemed to be doing things on their own. I have seen similar things at other events every year. Is this worthy of being called hacked? No. Do I think my student jumped to a rash decision and posted this thread before he thought of what it is implying? YES Hopefully he has thaught of what he did so when we talk about it he will have learned a lesson and this will all be over.

FLR, was a great event. Thanks to everyone that put in a lot of long hours to make it a success. This was the first regional that the students on my team have attending and they had a great time. Lets give congrats to the winners, praise the great job that every team did and learn from our mistakes and get ready for the next week.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I realize that this was likely not hacking but it was still a possibility. I was trying to gather opinions with this thread, nothing more. FLR is still the best event I've attended outside of the Championship thus far, and I have nothing against any of the teams or volunteers that were there. Sorry if it came off otherwise.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Steve,

The original post was coherent and well-written.

The discussion since has been calm, thoughtful and informative.

The topic is one that is always present and does not need to be kept locked away in the attic.

You are reacting very strongly to something, but I'm not sure what that something is. However, using only what is written in this dicussion thread as a guide, I see nothing troubling.

Blake

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

This too happened to team 3467 on Friday. The reason for this is when the voltage drops too low the cRIO will shutdown and restart to conserve battery power. We were out for about a minute before we started moving. This is one of the reasons that I will NEVER hit the stop button unless the robot is smoking or running about erratic.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Our team found similar issues both on and off field at FLR. We've traced control lockups to overuse of the cpu on the cRIO (or possibly the network stack), although we have no explanation as to why this would cause the code to fail without watchdogs tripping and all controls zeroing after a disable-enable cycle.

One other thing you might want to check out is the I/O board. We found that it occasionally goes crazy and crashes if the classmate is plugged into wall power (but never occurred on battery power).

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Hey, I am the coach for 191 (X-CATS) here and although we did experience some issues (largely on thursday though), we never experienced any issues with our connection going in and out and the drives being altered during the competition. Not sure why our team is mentioned here. We have absolutely no suspicions of us being "hacked" during the competition.

Thanks,
Xavier

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

*edits*
Sorry about that. I didn't think you guys were one of them, but I was told you were.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Well we noticed with us personally, that our autonomous was at fault for our disabling.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Yeah its fine. The field staff did come and talk to us at one point after a match as they thought they saw our connection going in and out, so I'm guessing thats where you got it from which is understandable. It was kind of funny their reaction when we were telling them that everything worked fine and the drives went perfect ("you sure everything was correct? nothing at all went wrong? you sure?"). It sucks that that happened to you guys though, I would hate to not be able to preform on the field because of something that was out of your control.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I don't think your team has anything to be ashamed of about what Brandon did. He thought of a possibility and presented it in a clear and objective manner. The original post was devoid of unreasonable accusations and was well-written. I do not think anyone thinks worse of your team due to this thread.

Edit: That being said, there are numerous reasons why robots would act erratically. My team had a match where our robot would turn right every time our driver let go of the controls, but this turned out to be a fault with our control system. I think the joysticks weren't zeroed correctly or something like that.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Blake,

Unless you know the situation , then you don't know what is reacting strong or not. This has nothing to do with how it is written.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

At the risk of being rude, it sounds as if you might be reacting a little strongly. Blake might not (and probably does not) know the situation, but I see no reason to respond snidely to someone who is simply offering their opinion. If there is perhaps, something more to the situation, then let it go at that.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Mr Ketron, I agree that your student probably jumped to conclusions but I have to wonder if this isn't something we should look into. What safe guards are in place to prevent such an occurrence from happening? What would the reaction be if it did occur (as far as FIRST goes)? How could it be proved (or disproved)?

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I believe the burden of breaking WPA2 alone is great enough to prevent this from being an issue, ever.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Aaaand bingo, this was the aim of my post, to bring this to people's attention in case something similar happens. Thanks.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

As mentioned prior though, some careful digging or social engineering might jump that hurdle.

After that, I'm not so convinced the system is that safe, it's worth looking in to. I don't think this particular instance is evidence of that, but I think it highlighted the fact it may be a problem. So far everyone has said that there was no hacking incident based on several plausible, likely explanations for the events that occurred. Other than relying on WPA security I haven't seen much counterargument about the 'hacking' not being possible.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but that's my $0.020000000000000001 (Sorry, using an Intel...)

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

You sir have just made my day.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I do enjoy eating cheese, or something...
[Post removed]

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

He was trolling. Ignore him.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Agreed. You should probably edit the post and toss that log, its giving him the attention he wants.

....am I in your signature? Nice.

Matt

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Yeah, I figured as much. Pity.

And to Mr. Troll: My hair being red? Not so much ;)

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I'd just like to add that Sab-BOT-age isn't thinking this was malicious either. Yes, we had some drivetrain problems, but with a independent driven & steered, continuous turn swerve drive, there are a lot of possibilities as to why. It wasn't consistently debilitating (we were semifinalists), and in fact, our current theory is a mechanical issue.

Robots are complicated, and running 6 at once through FMS certainly doesn't make it any simpler. Things go wrong at every regional - no reason to assume maliciousness, though prevention is also an important consideration.

FLR rocks! Good luck to everyone identifying and fixing their Week 1 issues and see you next year.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I am inclined to blame all this on Secret Subroutine C.

Secret Subroutine C exists, independent of programming language and regardless of care, deep within the depths of all robot command structures, no matter how simple or complex, no matter how foolproof or failsafe.

You cannot find Secret Subroutine C.
You cannot eliminate Secret Subroutine C.
You cannot control Secret Subroutine C.
The best you can do is try to prevent Secret Subroutine C from executing, and minimizing the damage when it does.

Translated from machine code into English, Secret Subroutine C reads only one line:

"Run amok and destroy your masters."

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I'm curious about the monitoring of errored packets and intermittent loss of connection.

Is that information categorized in the FMS by team number?

I think it would be nice to know if bad D-Link placement was giving some teams a significant disadvantage.

Since radio is essential to control and control is essential to safety. One might argue that radio functionality on the robot should pass some hurdle as part of robot inspection.

Team 241 had intermittent control problems at GSR- we were looking to blaming our own software or use of the CAN with the Jaguars or other things- it was only after the competition was over that we thought of actually moving our D-Link to a more radio signal friendly position on the robot.

If the problems don't show up at home base or in the pits or on the practice field, but show up on the competition field, it can be quite maddening. The problems seemed minimal on Thursday but got worse on Friday and Saturday.

As to robots moving and the joysticks not: it sounds to me that MotoSafety and/or watchdogs might be set to very long times( or removed) and connection to the DS was lost (or software took a long circuitous run through a loop).

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

If I recall correctly, radio signals, including wifi, are blocked by metal. Teams should definitely not have their radios inside the metal frame of their bot, especially since the new radios have significantly lower power.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

You can ask the FTA to monitor that for you and tell you after a match what kind of latency they saw. Ask before the match starts though. It's a lot more convenient to watch it than dig it out after the match. If something unusual happens on the field it's much easier to correlate.

Average trip (ms) is probably most important. You want this value below 20ms.
If it's higher, then you should relocate your radio.
The Missed Packet metric is not terribly useful, because it gets high when the Driver Station is on a long time before the robot or vice versa. It's not missed packets after communication is established.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Here is a random internet search for DAP-1522 performance...
http://evergbitswitchdome.blogspot.c...t-gigabit.html

"I noticed that the orientation of the DIR-655 and DAP-1522 made a difference in reported signal strength and data rate as shown in the DIR-655 console. So to make things work, do not forget to run some experiments to determine the best position of the devices to get the best possible performance... I am purposely trying to get my wireless sharing of my neighbors, and DAP1522 unusable, and I'm not exaggerating, 30 meters away. To be honest, there are 3 (not often, natural wood) between the walls and DAP1522 laptop - but still 30 feet? On the other hand, it could be a major selling point of fear that your neighbors might steal your wireless signal? Just buy a DAP1522! If you have a big house, or coverage area, is not going to cut it. But if you live in a small apartment, this thing is perfect."


The FRC competition field is a much more hostile environment than a typical apartment.

As far as I know, FIRST did not explicitly warn competitors this year that the new radio was weaker than in previous years. My guess is suboptimal radio placement on the robot that worked (well enough) in previous years does not work in a useable fashion with the DAP-1522.

Does anyone have any actual signal strength graphs as a function of orientation comparing the 2011 radio to the 2010 or earlier radio?

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Mark,
Thanks very much for the reply. The issue is: if you are a team that already suspect your radio signal is a potential problem in some matches, then you already have already planned to move the DAP1522 to a more optimal location on your robot. Its really the teams that don't suspect that they might have a problem that need their attention brought to it: otherwise, they might assume their problems are sourced in other places.

It would be a nice enhancement to the FMS to get it to only report dropped packets that occurred during the timed autonomous and teleop periods. And that problems are available for all teams to peruse. Radio geeks can set out on a mission to rid all lost WiFi packets from FRC competitions: ;)

Team 241 has gotten WiFi radio signal religion based on a maddening three days of debugging during a regional. I'll be instigating other teams to get their radios in more optimal positions.

Also interesting, the picture you show has two competitors with voltages under 10.25 volts.
Anything in that range should be flagged red and the data stored on an web or phone app. Then, both the Battery geeks and the Radio geeks can spread the word about their respective areas of expertise to teams that are clearly not understanding the trouble that they are tempting.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

That's where context becomes important.
Voltages bellow 10v are common during competition when the motors are all pulling the battery low.

The photo was taken during a match and the robots were on the move.

If the battery voltage is that low before the match begins, then teams will typically get a warning from the FTA/FTAA.

This is also why it's important to have your voltage feedback working correctly.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I agree with most of the above, Basicly WPA is much harder to hack and tamper with and it takes time to crack it because of the vast amount of possibilities. As far as the field acting "funny" this is a possibility but that wouldn't mean foul play was involved. Communications are delicate thing and one entry can mess up the whole thing. Sorry to hear that about your team.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

As for the DAP1522 placement: does it broadcast its signal like a typical antenna does? For those curious, current running in a loop creates a propagating magnetic field that DOES have polar regions. Thus, antennae always seem to work better when pointed up since the magnetic waves propagate tangental to the direction of current flow. Am I totall off here?

As for the hacking issue: go to arstechnica.com and read their 5-piece segment on how Anonymous hacked HBGary. They did the most damage via social engineering after they got some basic information via garbage data in URL's of the website (a database generates a webpage based upon these variables; if the database input isn't 'cleaned' before its used, then the database can be manipulated in various ways -- such as returning all of the user passwords). That FIRST changed our router this year is reassuring: there's less 'basic' information known about it than perhaps previous years. Yet there isn't even any brute force needed to crack the durn things if the WPA keys are left in the open (the social engineering aspect). I'm not sure if the keys are even given out to teams, or if they're on a clipboard on a wall, or were ever left unattended on a table. If they were, then there IS a SLIM (very slim) possibility that someone DID crack it. IF I were to try to figure out motive, I would say that it was hacking for fun, or more maliciously, hacking lower-priority targets in order to learn things that are useful for hacking higher-priority targets.

I'm not saying I condone hacking in any of its malicious aspects; I'm simply saying that if we're all better educated about it, we're better prepared for those with malicious intent. To think that it's impossible to do is ... well ... hopefully we're not THAT naive, with all of the quotes in signatures running around here about engineering feats that were once impossible.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I only read the first 2 pages of this post, but hacking the system is very unlikely unless someone managed to brute force the WPA2 keys, which is highly unlikely to happen during the limited time on the field. Another possibility is a person swiping the keys if they were written down somewhere easily accessible, which is possible but still very unlikely.

Still, the FMS should only allow data to be transferred between the specific IP addresses allocated to the Robot and the Driver Station. Even if a malicious person did have the WPA2 keys, I would think any additional devices connected to the FMS would be quite easy to detect.

A person would have to know a lot about how the entire communications system works. They would need to have the specific team's WPA2 key, know a way to fool the FMS, override the real Driver Station, intercept and emulate commands, figure out the controls to the specific robot, and pull all of it off within 2 minutes without being detected. Highly unlikely.

In any case, I'm >99% sure it was a field error.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

One of the reasons for the kiosks is to better secure the WPA keys. There is now no need for the field crew to print the keys at all. Instead they are loaded directly into the kiosk. It is possible to make a printout of them, but that would take a deliberate effort by somebody who knows what they are doing. There is little value in doing so just for kicks, so anybody who did so would probably have another goal in mind, which brings us back to "social engineering" (the current euphimism for espionage where I work)

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

At events I've been to in the past there were print-outs of instructions on how to configure the bridges which includes the teams key. The "new-style" bridges last year couldn't be configured with the kiosk so teams had to manually configure them. These print-outs often got pushed aside and could easily be lifted. I haven't yet been to an event this year so I do not know if the print-outs are still being given.

However what is to keep someone from bringing their own DAP-1522, walking up the kiosk and programming it with any teams key. After that they have a wireless bridge that gets them on the same network as the robot as long as they change the bridges static IP. I am not sure if the field would attempt to detect if this happens but I cannot think of a reason it wouldn't work.

The kiosks may be different this year but in the past there was no reason I could not enter another team at the events number and get their settings instead.

I am not suggesting anything happened, just pointing out that it is possible.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Sure blame the "hackers" lmao if you could provide more info maybe we could help.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I was not at FLR but from last years experience I remember that RIT has an IPS(intrusion prevention system) active on campus. This is to prevent rougue APs from running onsite. Most likely this is what caused the problems on Thursday and "could" possibly cause other issues even if turned off in the field house. "Breaking" WPA2 is possible but very unlikely in the short timeframe of the event.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Here are a few thoughts

1) I personally would be more likely to look for snowballs in hot places than look for hackers who break WPA2 keys and issue legit commands to teams' robots.

2) It is dead easy for any team to insert their own error detection and correction bits/words into application-level messages that travel to and from their robot. If a hacker was given or stole a WPA2 key and was creating garbled message payloads within otherwise valid messages, the team's custom, application-level detection/correction code would/could record the evidence.

3) It is dead easy for any team to create a 1-time pad cipher that would be shared by the application code in their driver station and their robot. Using one (plus a few other simple tricks) would prevent anyone with intimate knowledge of their robot and of their error detection/correction schemes from sending bogus messages to to the robot (unless they also had a copy of the pad).

4) If you want to implement items 2 & 3 go right ahead, you will learn something. One thing you are almost certain to learn is that your robot communication path is not being hacked. Maybe the path is having messages get lost due to environmental interference or unfortunate radio locations, but I'll risk betting a nice pizza that it isn't being hacked.

5) Have a contest to see who can hack your comms. Offer a pizza in exchange for each new method someone uses to successfully and non-trivially interfere with operating the robot (put it up on blocks for these experiments...). Report your findings to FIRST. Other than by using raw noise to simply overpower the radios, I'll bet few pizzas will be earned.

6) If you do ever think you have detected true malicious interference with robot comms, DON'T BE OBVIOUS about it. Don't grandly announce to your team and to the world that you have solved/discovered "the problem". That rumor will go through the tournament faster than an offer of free Red Bull & Krispy Kremes. Be mature and professional. Double and triple-check your evidence, then discretely contact FIRST and have a quiet conversation to see what they think.

Blake

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

As a result of certain recent events, I am revoking my comments about the possibility of hacking at FLR. I realized from the start that it was highly unlikely and was simply posting to point out possible causes to the issues that we saw occurring. Sorry if I started any controversy, and I certainly hope I haven't begun a whole new rumor about what could happen at future events. Hopefully I've learned my lesson about posting anything controversial on a high-traffic site.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

You have nothing to be ashamed of. There's no reason to be afraid of controversial topics, and you should never be afraid to question the system. Maybe your initial post could have been written better, and that is the lesson you should take from this, but don't think you did anything wrong by discussing this topic.

It's better to be a little disgruntled and aware of a potential problem then blissfully ignorant until the bus hits you. While FIRST has a pretty decent system in place, the only reason is because people looked at it and said "How can I break this system?". And honestly, it still has a lot to be desired in my opinion, but it's getting there.

I reiterate my point, you did nothing wrong, and there is no reason such topics should be so problematic. If anyone disagrees with, bring it on :)

Matt

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

ORIGNAL POST: (but I embolded key phrases):
"I know this is nothing more than speculation, but it's extremely fishy. While our team was at the Finger Lake Regional in New York, several teams had their robots suddenly act erratically during teleop, sometimes in a very suspicious manner."


Curiosity is one thing: casting aspersions as to a significant likelyhood of intentional unfairness perpetrated by someone is something else. It calls into question the fairness and the legitimacy of the entire competition.
I thnk Brandon no longer thinks such sentiments are appropriate to a large public forum without greater evidence.

The gracious thing is to assume a team's problems are it's own fault and to ask for help isolating them and not assume someone associated with FIRST or attending FIRST is out to get them by nefarious means.

The volunteer field crews work very hard. I know from personal experience that if a robot "misbehaves" on the competition field but does not misbehave on the practice field or on tether, it can be very frustrating. Isolating the cause of the difference of behavior can sometimes be very hard.

As demonstrated in Update #17, the technical staff is working quite hard to help teams identify issues with their robot prior to connecting to the FMS.

Teams should also know how and be ready to reset their robot if it "bricks" on the competition field.
We weren't.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

If you read my post (instead of just looking for something to be annoyed about) you'll see I also stated he should learn from this is regards to how he wrote the post. I believe he also understands he approached this thread the wrong way, and that is a valuable lesson to learn. However, another, incorrect lesson, that is being pushed here is that uncomfortable topics need to be tiptoe'd around and those who dare to confront them are wrong strictly because it's an uncomfortable topic.

Yes, he jumped to conclusions, and yes he made a mistake. And yes, he acknowledged that. That doesn't mean broaching the topic was a bad idea, just that next time, be a bit more careful how it is done, and I'm sure he will be.

Nobody ever did anything great by playing along and not making waves, sometimes waves need to be made. As far as your teams troubles go, I'm sorry you had them and I'm sorry you were unprepared. Personally, I don't think there's any shame in getting caught by something you didn't know was a problem, now you learned your lesson and you'll watch out for it next time. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate someone coming on CD and ripping in to you for not thinking to check your robot for a problem you weren't aware existed.

Matt

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

The field crews have been instructed not to print out the key lists. It is possible to do but there really is no reason to do so. While somebody could theoretically program their own DAP with a particular team's key, there are other measures in place to help detect this sort of activity. I will refrain from elaborating for obvious reasons.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I did read your whole post: my point is: the heat of a loss is never the time to publicly insinuate that someone may have the ability to cheat and used it against you. I don't know how Brandon could have written it publicly and still be graciously professional. Maybe you can suggest a few sentences of what he could have publicly written that would have been appropriate to get his sentiments across.

Insinuating problems should be investigated or blamed on the dishonesty efforts of others without any real evidence is a "sour grapes" meme that unintentionally disparages the competition. Brandon seems to have acknowledged this: you seemingly have not.

If you play a friendly card game and lose, it is not appropriate to immediately publicly ask if one of the friendly players cheated in the timeframe that the valid winners are enjoying their props.

One can choose the level of awareness to the potential for cheating. FIRST tries to be friendly, professional, and gracious.

I do not know how Brandon could have publicly approached the subject of his feeling his team was likely a recent victim of cheating at a FIRST competition in a manner would be seen as graciously professional.

If you can, I will certainly admit I was wrong and apologize to you.

I don't think Brandon should be ashamed: in fact, he's better for having made a mistake and admitting it and moving on. You seemed to imply that Brandon had just chosen the wrong words. I think it's not the words that were the issue- it was the sentiment, timing and location of that sentiment.

There is a huge amount of this competition that is mostly an honor system.
There are also many EASY ways to cheat that do not involve hacking- I'm going to assume that those ways to cheat aren't used sufficiently to worry about and I'm going to spend my energy elsewhere.

Are you starting with the position that there are likely enough cheaters involved in FIRST that we should spend our brainpower looking for them?

I have focused my brainpower on looking for the understanding of the laws of nature on highly complex equipment causing the seemingly nefarious robot behavior. I view it as time better spent.

I think we can agree that the right time to be broadcasting talk about potential hacking victimization is not the day the winning team is supposed to be celebrating their win.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Whether or not we lost the match is not relevant to me, and I already know the battery was at fault. I'm only pointing out a possibility as to the cause of certain specific problems, not necessarily with our team or alliance. Please don't take it as if I think people are actually cheating at all.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Apparently we disagree.

Written English is an imperfect medium. You saw an accusation of cheating and an attitude of sour grapes. I saw someone writing what many other people are curious about. When it looks like the system has been hacked, has it really been hacked? or are there other explanations? It is a fascinating topic.

The answer was that "Yes" there are many explanations other than malicious mischief.

Your last message describes many assumed motivations and attitudes that might be truly present in some minds, or might not. They certainly aren't declared in what I remember reading. If you found them between the lines, you might want to stop reading that part of this thread.

Unless you know something about the situation that the rest of us don't, please don't be so quick to assign negative motivations to an author when other explanations for their curiosity exist.

Gee, that last sentence contains a meme that sounds familiar.

Blake

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I already said, multiple times, I think he approached the topic wrong, and I would hope he learned that. That being said, being concerned (albeit and admittedly mistakenly) about the security of the arena network is not sour grapes. It's a concern. He voiced it, he was educated, he has learned something, this thread was enlightening for many people, myself included.

As far as an example, I would have approached it something like this:
I also do not think Brandon has anything to be ashamed of, and I do believe he has certainly learned. I also don't think his concerns cast a shadow on the teams that won the event, it wasn't as if he accused them of cheating, and I certainly don't believe they'd have taken it that way.

FIRST is supposed to inspire STEM and show students what the 'real life' does with it, and in the real life there will always be people looking to undermine the system to their own personal gain. I don't think (thankfully) it's present at a great capacity in FIRST, but I am concerned it could be if people stop asking "What's really keeping us secure here?" however I think you'd have to be a fool to think it's not there at all.

It seems to me your gripe is more with being disagreed with, than the topic at hand. Based on that, and the fact that at this point I believe I've made my case on this matter as abundantly clear as I can, and I am stepping out of the discussion unless the topic becomes more relevant to the actual original topics of this thread. If you really insist on following up, then you're welcome to PM, IM, email or carrier pigeon me.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Really now, how many quotes am I going to have to put in my signature? :P

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I find it amusing you like my jokes, my kids on my team tell me they're 'old person' jokes, call me Dark Ages and throw tomatoes at me...

Matt

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Don't mind me, I have a strange sense of humor. Even explosions make me laugh.

...and I'm out of tomatoes.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Don't cast aspersions on your friends- even the ones you don't know.
Especially in a public forum.

If someone uses phrases like "extremely fishy" and "very suspicious manner" and the team's teacher writes: "Do I think my student jumped to a rash decision and posted this thread before he thought of what it is implying? YES"

Intent and implication are two separate concepts.

I'll assume the teacher has a better read on the situation and I'll assume the people of FIRST are friendly and I don't need to worry about cheaters. You are welcome to assume other things.

Intentional misquotes are generally never welcome.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I don't believe that any of the teams have any reason to cheat, though there still may be some out there that might want to try. My original thoughts were that some students might want to hack for fun. You know, we're all geeks here, that's entirely possible. After all I've read, I still believe it's possible, but I no longer think that it has any likelihood of having occurred at FLR.

It's probably worth mentioning that I wrote the original post at 1 AM and my judgment wasn't the greatest, and I do regret parts of it, but I am unable to edit the post, so I guess what happens happens. It might also be worth mentioning that I was nearly barred from going to competitions with my team and am not currently on good terms with some people because of that post, but I felt I was doing the right thing by bringing hacking up as a possibility in the competitions.

All I wanted was to gather opinions and maybe get someone looking into what might be breachable in the system, and that's exactly what happened. There is also the unfortunate outcome of people who misunderstood my post, or understood it in the incorrect way that I wrote it. I'll admit I'm at fault for not waiting until I was awake enough to make proper sense.

Hopefully someone will read through the whole forum before accusing me of accusing someone of cheating next time, and hopefully my team will understand what I was trying to do.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Well, I'm glad we averted the downfall of Western civilization.

Anyone have anything interesting left to say about the original topic?

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I think the original topic was something along the lines of ...

" At the FLR regional, there were a number of robots that seemed to not be controlled by their team DS. They seemed to ignore inputs, would deploy minibots on their own, or lose comms and come back just as the match was ending. What are some possible explanations? Is is possible or likely that someone hacked the field or some of the networks and took control of the robots?"

On that topic, I'd say that another possible explanation for some of the robot movement that doesn't obey joystick input is that the team autonomous code wasn't finished. In NJ, I believe we saw five teams using Java and C++ whose exit condition for autonomous was not correct or whose autonomous would destroy objects that teleop would try to use. The result was that their tests worked fine in the pits, but on the field, their robot would mostly sit there and ignore controls. Sometimes the robot would crash due to null objects or invalid objects. Running a DS practice mode test would usually reproduce the effect in the pits. Other times it was necessary to alter the device boot sequence and run the practice match. If this happened, and a team had a more active autonomous, their robot would effectively be taking the DTF challenge of full auto. That may explain some of the odd behavior.

Other explanations -- low batteries can cause intermittent dropout of pretty much anything on the robot, and devices take different amounts of time to boot. If the robot reanimates after about a minute, I look at power to the radio. If it reanimates after ten to fifteen seconds, I look at the cRIO power.
Mechanical difficulties or loose wires can easily cause some inputs to make sense and others to be ignored. Robots that lose chains or PWM cables are really hard to drive, and until the team finds the smoking gun their mind is racing as to what caused that behavior.

As to whether or not it is possible to hack the field, I'd say that it was made my man and can be broken by man. It is possible. However, it is far more likely that a tornado will tear off the roof and six lightning bolts simultaneously scorch each of antennae on the field radio.

Also, if the field is hacked, hackers almost always leave footprints. I'm pretty sure FTAs and FIRST would quickly spot it and have tons of data to identify how it took place.

Finally, there are tons of easy ways to have fun at a FIRST regional. I suspect even the most hardened hacker would rather collect buttons or watch scoring trends. Making a team's robot sit still for 90 seconds just isn't that great by comparison. Maybe it would be fun to make their BFL blink morse code messages such as "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!", "I'll be back", "Hasta la vista, baby", or "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.". When I see that, I'll believe the field hack is more likely.

Greg McKaskle

Re: Possible FLR Hacking? Field control drop outs and
 

Robot Dlink dropouts can cause this.
The FTA's are not looking for this during the came. You will see them going over to the driver's control panel when the interruption is long enough. They have no log on their side which would show them.
Do not assume any diagnostics on their part except when they are only testing one robot during the new field control inspection test. Even then they can only diagnose to a very limited extent when a problem does arise, such as having the robot's Dlink visible, but not achieving two way communications.
Any robot which has only 10 volts is completely unpredicible and by far the most common problem. The second is intermittant dropouts of field control two way comms, Dlink itself losing power mementarily (which is why they gave us a new 12v-5v voltage control this year), after that you can have dropouts of the CAN, CAN2 or jaguars themselves. Each time this happens the systems come back one at a time and you're actually lucky if there's a clean re-start within 90 seconds.
Don't waste a single minute worrying about sabotage.