I’ve started to toy with the idea of making ones drones more secure against hacking and spoofing

Ok, let’s improve the security of your drones. Remember, a drone can be intercepted by fake commands and they can be hacked. The first one can be hard to defend against the second is easier, and will unfortunately make your drones a bit more expensive.

Buy an extra commlink and max it out as much as possible. Make a B/R test for connecting the drones control system to the commlink or if there is space, insert it inside the drone.

What we have now is an extra firewall for protecting your drone. It will only accept communications from the connected commlink who has a firewall of 6 and a system of 5.

Load the commlink with ECCM, Databomb (Device), Encryption (Signal) and Encryption (Device). Also add a Databomb (File: Subscription list). The latter will unfortunately lower your Response to 4, that’s allright – just fill in the last 4 slots with Agents with Analyze, Track and Spoof. Now you have 9 programs running and -1 to response.

You turn off wireless capability on the drone and let it rely on the Commlink. The commlink will have a higher matrix defense and security than the drone but will probably cost 10K more than usual.

On the other hand – security costs money.

You could probably add a second defense line where an agent is loaded on the commlink and whose soul purpose is to confirm orders from the master commlink by checking it’s latests log of commands – if the latest command hasn’t been given by the master commlink then the order will not be forwarded to the drone.

This might defend against spoofing command.

You could also just take a cheapo commlink with an agent checking the command log of the master commlink and you would have a cheap protection against spoofed commands. That way the drone would only cost +500-1000Y

You could also just crank up the response of your drone node to 6, and install Analyze, ECCM, Encryption and one agent, along with the drone pilot (which I assume is an Agent).

Drone pilot replaces system, so it doesn’t count as a running program
Don’t forget you will want to run some auto softs on those drones.


Edward

Ok, good point.
The more I think of it, the less I like this damn response rule . . .
But you need a high Firewall and System rating, because of spoofed commands. But at the moment, there are no rules, how spoofed commands behave, that go through several nodes. I would say, that every node checks for validity just in the example I gave for the hacker spoofing as a data packet to get relayed in my "hacking my way" thread.

In SR3 for enough nuyen you could run every program you wanted.

In SR4 with the most nova hot comlink on the face of the planet you can only have 5 programs running at once before things slow down. And using weaker programs doesn’t help, a rating 1 program will chew just as much processing power as a rating 6.

I think they took simplicity a bit to far on this one. But that seems to be the theme of SR4

Yeah, well, the upcoming books will make it complicated again.

You cant get response 7 stuff. Or rather they are as common as MPCP 14 decks in SR3 (GMPD only)


Edward

So now you’re saying that with a reasonable skill and a good backyard electronics lab I can build what the mega corps would take years to develop in a billion dollar facility complex employing several scientists and hundreds of support staff. Something that is in fact so hard to build that most mega corps would prefer have shadow runners steal it for them.

Edward

If a low rating program was so horrifically inefficient how could low rating hardware manage to run it at all.

For examples I will use encryption soft wear as it exists up to this point in time

10 years ago there was encryption soft wear that used a large portion of available power, the computers of today can run that soft wear with a tiny fraction of there power.

Today’s encryption programs would not run on the old computers at all, and use a large chunk of power on new computers.

Edward

True, such a program would not be as inefficient on an older system, but it is in no way trivial for a modern computer to run that particular antiquated program.

First, the computer would have to be using an emulator that simulates the environment of the outdated system in order for the program to be able to execute just by itself. Add in all the middleware necessary for the program to be able to interact with other modern applications and you find that you are chewing up more processor power than you would by using the new software.

So your explanation is based soly on the cost of backwards compatibility. 2 problems with this.

First in 2070 both the rating one and rating 6 systems are current teck so there is no backwards compatibility. A better example would be a desktop computer and a mainframe data server (both running versions of Windows XP) a data server running Windows XP server edition would find it trivial to run the local video store database (which runs on a PC with Windows XP home) while the PC would not be able to run a major corporations intranet common data store or email routing and storage.

Second my home computer (winXP) presently finds it trivial to run command and conquer for win95, having no problems keeping up its usual processor hunger background applications (download manager, active antivirus, firewall) while with modern games I usually have to turn something off (usually the download manager)

Ok, so the response issue is somewhat illogical but it does it’s job. The technomancer gains an edge here since he can run as many programs as he likes without getting response decrease. Unlike the hacker on the other hand he never has enough points for good complex forms.

A way to change the rules might be to use program “points” where (Response X System) equals the total amounts of “points” can be used before response decrease goes in effect. This way you can run lower rating programs together with high rating ones and only worry about the total amounts of rating points that goes towards response.

So a hacker with a Response 5 and System 5 commlink would have 25 points. He could then run 5 rating 5 programs and gain a -1 response or 4 rating 4 and a rating 6 and a rating 2 program, stopping him at 24 points and no loss to response.

Then we could say that it IS possible to run a program at a rating 6 but in that case we add a penalty of response multiplier for how many programs you can run. So the above hacker with a rating 6 program would actually have to lower his total points by ((Response-1)X System) to a total of 20 points. He would still have up to 13 points to spend on active programs without loosing response.

Ok, a lot more book keeping but it would be a more flexible system, and the Technomancer would be more gimped than ever since he basically lost his advantage.

If we use the rules above then we need to edit the rules for Tehnomancers as well and the easiest way is to givet hem the same set of resource rules as for hackers, programs cost money and the usual rules that response decrease does not count for Tehnomancers – the latter giving them a definite edge since they can run rating 6 programs without penalties.

The only limitation would be that they cannot buy IC and Agents, that’s what sprites are for.

The easy solution, that doesn’t even take much paperwork is to say the sum of the ratings of running programs must be les than response * system (and how often art hay not the same) or you loose one point of response for every full rating * response points of active programs.

Ok it looks simpler in pseudo code

Response decrees = [sum(program ratings)/(system*response)] round down.

Note, the formula always uses pre-degradation response and system ratings.

Edward