August 2018: Drones are increasingly becoming a security hazard in many ways. These include the weaponization of drones, targeting of commercial flights, and even attacks on heads of state. Current countermeasures include jamming the signal between the drone and the user, or even shooting the drone, but these have their own limitations and legal problems.
“[One] could quite easily modify these drones so that they go into an autonomous mode after some point, and carry out their mission without any regard for the command coming from the ground,” Dr. Humphreys says. “If that’s the case, then you can’t simply ward off these drones by jamming.”
Perhaps new legislation will help improve these defensive measures.
Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.
August 2018: Drones have become more present and accessible in the last couple of years. Their increasing presence now poses as a security challenge for authorities worldwide. These drone threats include everything from the security of heads of state to unauthorized surveillance.
Defense strategies are being implemented to intercept drones being used in these ways. But they may not be enough. "It is very difficult to hit a drone that is coming at high speed, at 100 km/h (70 mph), and it's not hard to build drones that do that," Humphreys said." Even if you could hit one drone that came in at high speed, what if five or 10 of them attacked you all at once?"
Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.
August 2018: Once started as a military project, GPS has found its way into the pockets of people worldwide, but it isn’t just used for maps. In fact, it is a very precise clock for computers around the Earth. When the GPS network fell apart for hours in 2016, it showed the network’s vulnerability to interference from pigeon poop on cell towers to GPS spoofing.
Such methods “would certainly work against Ubers, Waymo’s self-driving cars, delivery drones from Amazon,” and more, says Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Because GPS is so pervasive in today’s technology and economy, it needs to either be better protected or less relied upon.
Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.