Most people are leery enough as it is when it comes to the U.S government's desire to put thousands of surveillance drones in the skies above their cities, schools, parks, and private homes. Now there's cause for even more alarm, as a recent demonstration proved just how easily those drones can be hijacked and made to do whatever the hijacker wants.
At a demonstration at Austin Stadium two weeks ago (and repeated days later at the White Sands Missile Bay for members of the Federal Aviation Admininstration (FAA) and Department of Homeland Security), researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, led by Professor Todd Humphreys showed how easily drones can have their signals intercepted and altered by 'spoofing' the GPS receiver of the drone.
Unlike simply jamming the signal (also a concern, as GPS jammers are readily available online), spoofers can completely override the signal being sent to the drone via satellite and replace it with whatever seemingly legitimate signal the hijacker wants, which could include telling the drone to crash into something.
"In 5 or 10 years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace, each one of these could be a potential missile used against us" Professor Humphreys told Fox News. "Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane."
While drones are currently blocked from flying in U.S airspace, that's about to change. A ruling in February put pressure on the FAA to come up with guidelines that would allow not only government use of drones, but even commercial use of drones, by 2015. And several companies are already eager to add drones to their payroll, including Fedex founder Fred Smith, who has plans to add unmanned drones to his fleet as soon as he is legally able.
The U.S government is aware of the major security hole, and is working on solutions to shore it up, with the development of the Patriot Watch and Patriot Shield programs as a starting step. If there's anything we know about the cat and mouse game of security though, it's that the ones looking to breach that security usually manage to find a way, no matter how well defended their target is, with the security companies in a reactive role; not a promising thought given the potential consequences of such a security failure.
What do you think of having unmanned drones which could potentially be hijacked flying over U.S airspace within as little as 3 years? Is this foolhardy madness that should be stopped, or just another inevitability that will happen eventually, one way or the other? Let us know your deepest and darkest drone fears in the comments below.
