There’s a New Way to Take Down Drones, and It Doesn’t Involve Shotguns
Besides hijacking a drone, the device provides a digital fingerprint that’s unique to each craft. The fingerprint can be used to identify trusted drones from unfriendly ones and potentially to provide forensic evidence for use in criminal or civil court cases. Unlike most other counter-drone technologies publicly demonstrated to date, it isn’t a frequency jammer that merely prevents a remote control from communicating with a drone. Instead, it gives the holder the ability to completely seize control of the unmanned craft. It was presented on Wednesday at the PacSec 2016 security conference in Tokyo by Jonathan Andersson, the advanced security research group manager at Trend Micro’s TippingPoint DVLab division.
“In the defense and security world, there are people who have done this,” Robi Sen, the founder of counter-drone product maker Department 13, told Ars. “There are also a few hackers who have done this but have not made their research public. To my knowledge, this is the first time that this has all been presented, in a complete package, publicly.”
Andersson’s drone hijacker works because the process DSMx uses to connect a remote control to a drone doesn’t sufficiently cloak a crucial piece of information that is shared between the two devices.
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