From RT.com, (hat tip Bastiat Institute) [Italics original]
There are a lot of cool things you can do with $1,000, but scientists at an Austin, Texas college have come across one that is often overlooked: for less than a grand, how’d you like to hijack a US government drone?
A group of researchers led by Professor Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas at Austin Radionavigation Laboratory recently succeeded in raising the eyebrows of the US government. With just around $1,000 in parts, Humphreys’ team took control of an unmanned aerial vehicle operated by the US Department of Homeland Security.
After being challenged by his lab, the DHS dared Humphreys’ crew to hack into their drone and take command. Much to their chagrin, they did exactly that.
Humphrey tells Fox News that for a few hundreds dollar his team was able to “spoof” the GPS system on board the DHS drone, a technique that involves mimicking the actual signals sent to the global positioning device and then eventually tricking the target into following a new set of commands. And, for just $1,000, Humphreys says the spoofer his team assembled was the most advanced one ever built.
“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys tells Fox. The real danger here, however, is that the government is currently considering plans that will allow local law enforcement agencies and other organizations from coast-to-coast to control drones of their own in America’s airspace.
“In five or ten years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” he tells Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”
I guess that with “30,000 drones in the airspace” encroaching on people’s privacy, drone hackers will be in big demand.
The author of this article is working very hard to foster paranoia about UAVs in this country and makes a lot of incorrect conclusions/analysis of the situation.
ReplyDeleteSo, first of all, this is the Fox News video that the article keeps referencing, http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/06/25/drones-vulnerable-to-terrorist-hijacking-researchers-say/
And in the video you can see that Mr. Humphreys doesn’t “take control” of a government UAV, he manipulates a small helicopter that is the test platform for UT. Secondly, what he’s doing isn’t actually taking control of the aircraft or even hacking it and his comment about turning UAVs into missiles is just irritating. GPS is a form of navigation whereby a receiver picks up signals from orbiting sattelites in order to discern its position on or above the ground. By “spoofing” these signals what you are doing is telling the receiver that it is in a certain location or altitude when it’s actually somewhere else. I would equate this to changing all of the road signs on a freeway, in this situation drivers would become lost and nothing more; it would be absurd to say that by changing road signs you have “taken control” of the cars on the road or that you have turned these cars into “missiles” or “hijacked” them…
There is an additional element to GPS concerning aircraft in that aircraft also use GPS to determine their vertical position in space- altitude. However most UAVs actually “fly” by barometric altitude not GPS altitude, the same as manned aircraft do, even though they use GPS altitude as a reference. So while an aircraft flying off of GPS altitude alone could be tricked into flying into the ground, the UAVs that the government currently flys do not do this and I would imagine that if a UAV operator saw a marked deviation in GPS altitude from Barometric altitude then that operator would be cued to the fact that his GPS had been compromised and could start flying the plane through other navigational means and ignore the GPS.
The main thing that the article neglects to explain is that while GPS is generally a UAV’s primary navigational system, it is not the only means of navigating the aircraft and that just because this navigational system has been shown that it can be tricked it doesn’t mean that an unmanned aircraft operator has lost control of the aircraft. Furthermore there are encrypted government use GPS systems that are not prone to this type of “spoofing.”
I concur with the previous poster that this article hypes a problem that already has a solution. It's called SAASM. The Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module. Makes it a giant PITA to "spoof" those GPS signals, and it requires a helluva lot more than $1000 in hardware to defeat. The aircraft this professor's team spoofed the signals on wasn't equipped with a SAASM receiver.
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