[spitfire]

Drone deense/hijacking is a funny subject. Wonder how many weeks it'll take for people to write an autopilot-on-loss-of-signal for drones.

In fact that's sort of the endgame for drones. People don't control the drones, they tell them what to do/where to go. The autopilot figures out how to complete that task.

[ryandamm]

Endgame is not just signal, it's inputs like GPS. Also, without external inputs, it's damned difficult to keep a lock on your location. But... not impossible.

Counterpoint, which confirms your comment: I spoke with a drone designer (DoD contract, so I won't name his company) who said he won a Red Team exercise (quaint terminology, that) against the US Armed Forces by using superior fly-without-GPS algorithm to get through a GPS suppression countermeasure. So... yeah, it's a thing.

That said, trying to do dead reckoning from a series of noisy sensor measurements isn't easy. Bias drift, quantization roundoff error (which integrates to a random walk if you're sensing rate), and filter decoherence are all real issues.

[dimdimdim]

At the very same time it is trivial to update the drones of today to use a secure mutual authentication mechanism which the "drone defender" cannot break into. So, even if there is a spectrum DoS (which might be illegal to do for anyone apart from law enforcement) its not that the defender will take over the drone.

This is a cat n mouse game where the drone creator always has an advantage.

[ryandamm]

Yeah, but GPS isn't a handshake, and most commodity drones rely on it. You can't take it over, but you can probably blind it.

[mhowland]

It's been spoofable (and jamable) for some time...but serious PIA to do and a huge FCC no-no as it's tough to focus.

http://news.utexas.edu/2013/07/29/ut-austin-researchers-succ...

[run4yourlives2]

Do you really need GPS to tell the drone, "Remember your flight control inputs and reverse them on loss of signal?"

I'm sure it's not trivial, but drone defence based completely on signal interception seems straightforward to defeat.

[WalterSear]

Iran claims to have captured drones by spoofing the GPS.

[artpar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHKV01YQX_w