Spotlight

How Islamic Jihad Hacked Israel’s Drones

“For at least two years, the Palestinian terror group Islamic Jihad could see what the Israeli military’s surveillance drones saw. That’s the accusation of Israeli prosecutors, who this week arrested a man [Maagad Ben Juwad Oydeh] they saw hacked into the drones’ video feeds. Israeli authorities have provided only the barest details of Oydeh’s background and alleged crimes. The drone hack is possibly the most dramatic of Oydeh’s alleged crimes, if not the most useful for terrorist planners.”

Dr. Todd Humphreys and Dr. Richard Langley (University of New Brunswick) explain how Oydeh could have managed to hack the drones’ video feed, and how Israeli authorities may have come to know about it.

Read the article on thedailybeast.com.

How Secure is the Future of Mobile Positioning?

Dr. Todd Humphreys wrote an article for the February 2016 issue of IEEE ComSoc Technology News.

“Professor Todd Humphreys, an expert in the James Bond world of faking out GPS signaling, tells us what the latest news is for the reliability of the GPS systems that have become increasingly important to our everyday lives. Will GPS become the next front in the war between the modern world and the hackers and terrorists who wish to disrupt it? If so it will be engineers and not super spies who will save the day.”

Read the article on comsoc.org.

Wired Article on Drone Defenses

A recent article on Wired featured comments from Dr. Humphreys’s Congressional testimony on the threat of rogue UAVs.

“With only minor changes to [a] UAV’s autopilot software, of which highly capable open-source variants exist, an attacker could readily disable geofencing and could configure the UAV to operate under ‘radio silence,’ ignoring external radio control commands and emitting no radio signals of its own” … “Imposing restrictions on small UAVs beyond the sensible restrictions the Federal Aviation Administration recently proposed would not significantly reduce the threat of rogue UAVs yet would shackle the emerging commercial UAV industry”.

Read the article on wired.com.

UT Radionavigation Lab features in national news

The UT Radionavigation Lab featured on NBC Nightly News with Kristen Welker on October 31, 2015. The segment focused on anti-UAV techniques developed by Dr. Humphreys and his students, which have come into the spotlight following the inadvertent landing of a drone at the White House.

The news segment can be viewed at the NBS News website.

Dr. Todd Humphreys delivers keynote presentation at 2015 Texas GIS Forum

Austin, TX—Dr. Todd Humphreys delivered a keynote presentation at the 2015 Texas GIS Forum, where he talked about rendering of geo-referenced decimeter accurate maps using Low-Cost Mobile Positioning on a smartphone along with the smartphone’s camera.

This presentation focused on techniques for performing carrier-phase differential positioning using a low-quality antenna, and generation of an accurate 3-dimensional point cloud using a smartphone. The points in the generated map are geo-referenced which enables distributed generation of maps, unlike the standard computer vision techniques where a continuous sequence of overlapping images is required.

The presentation can be downloaded from here.

Dr. Humphreys talks about Low-Cost Centimeter-Accurate Mobile Positioning at Roadway Safety Institute (University of Minnesota)

Minneapolis, MN—Dr. Todd Humphreys delivered a seminar at the Roadway Safety Insititute at University of Minnesota, where he talked about Low-Cost Centimeter-Accurate Mobile Positioning with attention to application in Vehicular Networks. GNSS, along with other sensors, will be a part of the Connected (Semi-) Autonomous Vehicles of the future, and accurate location and timing via GNSS is an important aspect of roadway safety.

The primary barrier to performing centimeter-accurate carrier-phase-differential GNSS (CDGNSS) positioning on smartphones and other consumer devices is their low-cost, low-quality GNSS antennas that have poor multipath suppression. The time correlation of multipath errors and their magnitude significantly increases the initialization period of GNSS receivers using low-cost antennas.

This presentation focused on techniques for reducing the initialization time for centimeter-accurate positioning on mobile devices. It further examined technical and market prerequisites for improved safety for semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, globally registered augmented and virtual reality, and crowd-sourced three-dimensional mapping.

Watch the full length presentation at Roadway Safety Institute webpage.

Scientific American: Dr. Humphreys talks about Drone Drop-Offs

“Amazon badly wants to deliver packages of DVDs and Cheez-Its to your doorstep in a matter of minutes—and it wants to use drones to do so. At a NASA convention in July, Amazon Prime Air’s vice president proposed the company’s vision for how unmanned aircraft could one day safely navigate our skies. And NASA recently began testing its first version of an air traffic management system for drones—the agency is partnering with companies including Amazon and Verizon to develop the system.”

“For now, regulations and technical issues make widespread drone deliveries impossible, which means an army of flying machines probably will not fetch your holiday gifts this year or even the next. Here’s what experts note as the major challenges to resolve before delivery by drone becomes a reality.”

Continue reading the article at Scientific American, which features comments by Dr. Humphreys.

Ken Pesyna to receive the 2015 Marconi Society Young Scholar Award, August 2015

Mountain View, CA—Ken Pesyna, a doctoral candidate at The University of Texas Electrical Engineering School, has been selected to receive the 2015 Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar Award. The 28-year-old researcher will receive the award at the Royal Society in London on October 20, 2015. 

“Ken’s work on centimeter-accurate and power efficient GPS may have turned conventional wisdom about this field on its head,” says Bob Tkach, a Marconi Fellow and chairman of the Young Scholar selection committee. “His ability not only to develop a new theory but to prove it in practice was truly impressive. Ken is on track to make breakthrough contributions in our field.”

Continue reading the announcement from the Marconi Society.

Dr. Humphreys speaks on GPS Navigation Message Authentication before the U.S. National PNT Advisory Board, June 2015

The National PNT Advisory Board invited Dr. Humphreys to speak at their “GPS toughening” working group meeting on June 10 and then to present before the full Advisory Board on June 11.  His presentation concerned GPS navigation message authentication as a means of “toughening” GPS receivers against unintentional and intentional GPS spoofing.  As part of the presentation, Humphreys offered a categorization and an ordering of spoofing attacks and defenses that will be a good starting point for a proper civil GPS threat assessment.

See the meeting agenda, the posted slides (pdf) for “Toughening Techniques for GPS Receivers: Navigation Message Authentication,” and the full presentation (pptx).