Huh? What makes you think criminals will be sure to use a drone with such an ID system? There are no unique parts to a drone. Other than the motor controller and motors, it's mostly cellphone parts. Motors and controller have several other applications.

Drones that fail to ID themselves will be shot down on sight.

You could always spoof the ID so that kinda defeats the purpose.

Maybe have each drone regularly broadcast their GPS's most recent NMEA sentence (latitude, longitude, timestamp, altitude, etc.) signed with their public key?

That's what came up with after thinking about it for a bit. There's probably a better solution out there.

Pretty sure we have solved this problem, since we use HTTPS

Thus guaranteeing that unregistered drones are dangerous.

Who cares? Are you suggesting setting up an agency that monitors 'airspace' (I wouldn't call area 20 meters above ground an airspace)?

I don't want my drone to be seen at the moment of crime anyway.

Don't like drone in front of you? Accidentally throw a piece of string on it.

> Then, while you still won't be able to stop assassinations and such, just like you can't stop them now anyway, you can at least know who did it

Even if you get criminals to comply as far as only operating drones with proper IDs, so that you can trace the legal purchase history of a drone, that doesn't mean you know who used the drone. Drones and their supporting control equipment can be stolen (and the owners prevented by force from reporting the theft) and people willing to commit assassination by drone certainly wouldn't be unwilling to commit theft, kidnapping, and/or murder of drone owners to acheive that.

There's little to prevent construction of unlicensed drones. Like they say, make operating drones illegal, and only criminals will have drones. And they can be made simply with mail-order parts.

Probably we're just going to have to get used to drones being around. Like we got used to cities and crowds on public streets and horseless carriages. This paranoia about drones will be seen by future historians as quaint.

The FAA has just this week said that drones flying under a COA will be required to have an N-number: http://www.uasvision.com/2014/09/25/faa-issues-requirement-f...

That's like asking for every gun or knife to have a unique cryptographic identifier.

Guns and knives aren't (usually) electronics.

And guns have serial numbers and records to trace their purchase, right?

How would you make sure this cryptographic identifier cannot be tampered with?

Do you expect to be able to regulate the electronics industry that tightly? You'd need some universal DRM system implemented in every accelerometer, GPS module, electric motor, and microcontroller.