> drone defense

The security world is very interested. Put an explosive on a drone and you've made a guided missile, a technology formerly reserved for militaries. How do you protect your troops, your field headquarters, or in peaceful scenarios, an event or a VIP such as the President?

Drone defense is very interesting....but I find the concept of jamming/electronic spoofing/RF commandeering somewhat comical in this arena. (what ApolloShield seems to be doing)

This is a physical threat (in the terrorist scenario) that needs to be dealt with kinetically.

RF spoofing doesn't work for planed flights, GPS spoofing can work but reply attacks are wonky at best and most just will trigger a "go home" which is easily overridden to be the target.

Skywall (http://openworksengineering.com/skywall) type stuff is interesting, but very hard to get right...know a few folks in the field working on some cool stuff.

The passive whoops I'm a terrible drone pilot and flew my drone over moffet is fairly easy to deal with (betting we'll see some sort of drone tagging (RF)/mgmt system tied to the in-place registration very soon)...but not nearly as lucrative as true airspace security

/2cents from someone not in the field but interested in it

> This is a physical threat (in the terrorist scenario) that needs to be dealt with kinetically.

While I completely agree with you I'm curious if the pricing has come down on powerful lasers as I could see it being more economical to simply burn the rogue drones out of the sky. It would make re-targeting much faster and less of a need to keep kinetic...material on hand.

So then the terrorist coats their drone in foil, and instead you are blinding anybody who looks at the drone when you fire.

No, kinetic or nets is much better.

> So then the terrorist coats their drone in foil, and instead you are blinding anybody who looks at the drone when you fire.

Many of the laser systems the military have been working with are not in the visual spectrum and foil would not simply reflect it. Otherwise the majority of our anti missile systems that use lasers would be thwarted by a simple foil coating.

> No, kinetic or nets is much better.

All depends on the goal. A quick burnout with a laser which has no reload time and can hit targets in a near instant is highly valuable in anti missile systems; I don't see why this couldn't be applied in an anti drone fashion as well. Kinetics will serve to obliterate which is better as far as falling debris goes; might be useful to have a combination of both in case you have to fend off a larger than expected amount of drones.

Drone deense/hijacking is a funny subject. Wonder how many weeks it'll take for people to write an autopilot-on-loss-of-signal for drones.

In fact that's sort of the endgame for drones. People don't control the drones, they tell them what to do/where to go. The autopilot figures out how to complete that task.

Endgame is not just signal, it's inputs like GPS. Also, without external inputs, it's damned difficult to keep a lock on your location. But... not impossible.

Counterpoint, which confirms your comment: I spoke with a drone designer (DoD contract, so I won't name his company) who said he won a Red Team exercise (quaint terminology, that) against the US Armed Forces by using superior fly-without-GPS algorithm to get through a GPS suppression countermeasure. So... yeah, it's a thing.

That said, trying to do dead reckoning from a series of noisy sensor measurements isn't easy. Bias drift, quantization roundoff error (which integrates to a random walk if you're sensing rate), and filter decoherence are all real issues.

At the very same time it is trivial to update the drones of today to use a secure mutual authentication mechanism which the "drone defender" cannot break into. So, even if there is a spectrum DoS (which might be illegal to do for anyone apart from law enforcement) its not that the defender will take over the drone.

This is a cat n mouse game where the drone creator always has an advantage.

Yeah, but GPS isn't a handshake, and most commodity drones rely on it. You can't take it over, but you can probably blind it.

It's been spoofable (and jamable) for some time...but serious PIA to do and a huge FCC no-no as it's tough to focus.

http://news.utexas.edu/2013/07/29/ut-austin-researchers-succ...

Do you really need GPS to tell the drone, "Remember your flight control inputs and reverse them on loss of signal?"

I'm sure it's not trivial, but drone defence based completely on signal interception seems straightforward to defeat.

Iran claims to have captured drones by spoofing the GPS.

There's a similar startup in our little accelerator here. Interesting space.