Hacking predator drones

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45685870/ns/world_news-christian_science_monitor/

Ha!

That’s an awesome hack. Although from what I know about military grade GPS, the attack mentioned should not have worked…well, that is of course if they actually used the military grade GPS like they are suppose to… but then again you would have thought the would have used at least SOME encryption of the streams on previous drones… so there’s that.

I read somewhere that there was a real possibility they didn’t use military GPS because civilian hardware was cheaper.

That’s kind of what I’m thinking as well…

If I were building a GPS receiver with robustness rather than security in mind, I’d fall back on the civilian stream if the encrypted wasn’t available. I’m guessing some contractors are working hard on some software changes right now.

The other thing I’d do for security would be to have a simple inertial navigation system as backup… those are cheap and small these days, and would be accurate enough to validate GPS. If spoofing GPS to make a drone think it was in Afghanistan instead of Iran, it would vary enough from inertial data to see a discrepancy.