Spotlight

“There are a few reasons for a Longhorn football practice to be moved—a tornado, hail, and fire come to mind—but a science experiment isn’t usually one of them. But it wasn’t just any science experiment that caused UT Athletics officials to relocate the Longhorns’ strength-training practice last week: it was a demo that revealed a new danger to our national security. “It was funny,” says Todd Humphreys, director of UT’s Radionavigation Lab. “We were doing this huge, unprecedented demo, and the students were most excited about the fact that they moved football practice for us.” Humphreys and a group of engineering students have dedicated their time to researching a powerful new GPS technology known as spoofing, through which one GPS signal is replaced by another.

Continue reading the Alcalde article.

“A University of Texas at Austin research team successfully demonstrated for the first time that the GPS signals of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, can be commandeered by an outside source—a discovery that could factor heavily into the implementation of a new federal mandate to allow thousands of civilian drones into the U.S. airspace by 2015. Cockrell School of Engineering Assistant Professor Todd Humphreys and his students were invited by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to attempt the demonstration in White Sands, New Mexico in late June. Using a small but sophisticated UAV along with hardware and software developed by Humphreys and his students, the research team repeatedly overtook navigational signals going to the GPS-guided vehicle.

Continue reading the UT Engineering article.

“The BBC is reporting that researchers from the University of Texas at Austin managed to hack an experimental drone by spoofing GPS signals. Theoretically, this would allow the hackers to direct the drone to coordinates of their choosing. ‘The spoofed drone used an unencrypted GPS signal, which is normally used by civilian planes, says Noel Sharkey, co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. “It’s easy to spoof an unencrypted drone. Anybody technically skilled could do this – it would cost them some £700 for the equipment and that’s it,” he told BBC News. “It’s very dangerous – if a drone is being directed somewhere using its GPS, [a spoofer] can make it think it’s somewhere else and make it crash into a building, or crash somewhere else, or just steal it and fill it with explosives and direct somewhere. But the big worry is — it also means that it wouldn’t be too hard for [a very skilled person] to work out how to un-encrypt military drones and spoof them, and that could be extremely dangerous because they could turn them on the wrong people.”

Continue reading the Slashdot article.

“American researchers took control of a flying drone by hacking into its GPS system – acting on a $1,000 (£640) dare from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A University of Texas at Austin team used “spoofing” – a technique where the drone mistakes the signal from hackers for the one sent from GPS satellites. The same method may have been used to bring down a US drone in Iran in 2011. Analysts say that the demo shows the potential danger of using drones.”

Continue reading the BBC article.

Listen to the three-minute-long podcast interview with Dr. Humphreys starting at 49:30.

“Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin Radionavigation Laboratory have successfully demonstrated that a drone with an unencrypted GPS system can be taken over by a person wielding a GPS spoofing device. You can see a video accompanying a Fox News story on it, as well as a video here of an experiment conducted by the researchers, led by Professor Todd Humphreys.

Humphreys and company were recently invited by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to demonstrate whether their capability to successfully spoof commercial GPS systems in the laboratory could work in the field. Spoofing, as defined in this article by UT researchers, is “the transmission of matched-GPS-signal-structure interference in an attempt to commandeer the tracking loops of a victim receiver and thereby manipulate the receiver’s timing or navigation solution. A spoofer can transmit its counterfeit signals from a stand-off distance of several hundred meters or it can be co-located with its victim.”

Continue reading the IEEE Spectrum Risk Factor blog post.

Listen to an audio interview with Dr. Humphreys.

“A small surveillance drone flies over an Austin stadium, diligently following a series of GPS waypoints that have been programmed into its flight computer. By all appearances, the mission is routine.

Suddenly, the drone veers dramatically off course, careering eastward from its intended flight path. A few moments later, it is clear something is seriously wrong as the drone makes a hard right turn, streaking toward the south. Then, as if some phantom has given the drone a self-destruct order, it hurtles toward the ground. Just a few feet from certain catastrophe, a safety pilot with a radio control saves the drone from crashing into the field.

From the sidelines, there are smiles all around over this near-disaster. Professor Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory have just completed a successful experiment: illuminating a gaping hole in the government’s plan to open US airspace to thousands of drones.

They could be turned into weapons.Continue reading and watching the FoxNews coverage:

• “Drones Vulnerable to Terrorist Hijacking, Researchers Say“
• “Are Unmanned Drones Safe in US Airspace?“
• “Domestic Drone Concerns“
• “Congress Hears Warnings about Drones in US Skies“
  
  Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/19/congress-hears-warnings-about-drones-in-us-skies/#ixzz21Sm5Ssz4

“In his small workshop cluttered with machines of all kinds, Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation at the University of Texas at Austin, shows a video his students made of a recent test. It shows a smartphone, held at arm’s length, showing Google Maps on the screen: “The device locates its position with GPS and indicates its position with a blue dot on the map.” Suddenly, the blue dot starts to move, as if the smartphone were riding in a car, but the actual smartphone stays in the same place. “

Continue reading Le Monde article  [French].