6/29/2012 ~ The Dangers of #Drone Nation - Forbes

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Washington
6/29/2012 @ 12:35PM|118 views

A US Predator unmanned drone armed with a missile stands on the tarmac of Kandahar military airport.(Image credit: AFP via @daylife)

Is there a term for when a movie plot happens in real life before it makes it onto the screen? Because that’s what’s happening now with aerial drones. In recent experiments reported by Fox News’s John Roberts, researchers at the University of Texas Radionavigation Lab have hacked into  drones and taken over their navigation systems. They used a technique called spoofing, tricking the drone’s GPS guidance into thinking the illicit  instructions were coming from its home base. If this were a traditional hijacking, it would be like snapping your fingers and hypnotizing the pilot into doing whatever you wanted.


Until recently, the biggest threat to drone security was jamming satellite GPS signals. That’s child’s play next to what’s coming:

While jammers can cause problems by muddling GPS signals, spoofers are a giant leap forward in technology; they can actually manipulate navigation computers with false information that looks real. With his device — what [UT Professor Todd] Humphreys calls the most advanced spoofer ever built (at a cost of just $1,000) — he infiltrates the GPS system of the drone with a signal more powerful than the one coming down from the satellites orbiting high above the earth.
Initially, his signal matches that of the GPS system so the drone thinks nothing is amiss. That’s when he attacks — sending his own commands to the onboard computer, putting the drone at his beck and call.

Drones have been around for a long time, used mostly abroad in our various foreign conflicts of the past decade. Like many other forms of technology, they have grown steadily smaller, cheaper, and more sophisticated. And now, with a decade of war winding down, all that wonderful technology has to go somewhere. Drones have many domestic uses, from law enforcement surveillance to environmental monitoring, and make a lot of previously difficult and expensive things cheap and easy. But if, over the course of a few years, we have thousands of drones in the skies, run or overseen by a hodgepodge of federal, state and local government agencies and private companies, it’s a recipe not just for possible erosions of civil liberties, but for danger.

There is every sign that the rush to import drones for domestic use, driven by economic imperatives of military and security contractors, and companies such as FedEx, which want to automate their cargo planes, will overtake the abilities of governments to manage and regulate the transition. Do we really think the Department of Homeland Security is up to this task?

DHS is attempting to identify and mitigate GPS interference through its new “Patriot Watch” and “Patriot Shield” programs, but the effort is poorly funded, still in its infancy, and is mostly geared toward finding people using jammers, not spoofers.

The potential consequences of GPS spoofing are nothing short of chilling. Humphreys warns that a terrorist group could match his technology, and in crowded U.S. airspace, cause havoc.
“I’m worried about them crashing into other planes,” he told Fox News. “I’m worried about them crashing into buildings. We could get collisions in the air and there could be loss of life, so we want to prevent this and get out in front of the problem.”

The fact that this coming revolution, the emergence of Drone Nation, is still mostly shrouded in secrecy will raise the risks, because the public probably won’t know something is amiss until disaster strikes. In all likelihood it won’t be a terrorist strike, but a simple accident: a midair collision or a drone crashing into somebody’s bedroom. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Lynch told Willamette Week when it discovered a secret drone base near Portland, Oregon: “We have no information on the drones public entities are flying, how many they have and where they’re authorized to fly. I think that’s pretty concerning.”

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