Texas college hacks drone in front of DHS

**robtygart** · July 12th, 2012

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 owned by the college, all in front of the US Department of Homeland Security.

After being challenged by his lab, the DHS dared Humphreys’ crew to hack into a drone and take command. Much to their chagrin, they did exactly that.

Interesting article, I thought some of you might be interested in it.

I wonder if they used Linux.

**Paqman** · July 12th, 2012

There's been a lot of talk about GPS spoofing and drones, but I don't really see how it's a serious threat.

Military GPS is encrypted, so can't be spoofed, only jammed.
The GPS aerials on military drones are upwards-facing (particularly on stealthy ones), so to reliably jam them you'd need to be above them.
Unless you're also flying a drone, it'll pass out of your area pretty quickly. Blanketing large areas with GPS spoofing or jamming base stations isn't practical.
Aircraft only use GPS for error-checking inertial navigation at their waypoints anyway. So the best you could do would be introduce a small error in navigation to the next waypoint.

So GPS spoofing is a non-issue for most of the UAVs flying today, and not likely to be much of an issue for future civilian ones.

**lukeiamyourfather** · July 12th, 2012

I dabble with drones as a hobby and I can see how this could cause some trouble for some people. The threat is blown out of proportion by the media though in my opinion. There are plenty of ways to combat the attack. One way would be to monitor for inconsistent position information. If the position information jumps or changes unexpectedly in such a way that could never be possible (for example jumping 500 feet in a fraction of a second) then the GPS could become "untrustworthy" and rely on the compass and airspeed to go generally back in the direction of home.

Or if the GPS information doesn't correlate with the rest of the information from the sensors like the barometer, compass, and accelerometers then the same "untrustworthy" status could be evoked. For example if the compass and airspeed indicate the drone has been traveling north for a while but the GPS says east, obviously something is wrong. Still a neat story and technique! Congratulations to the students and their mentors.