There are many stories these days about drones, including a smart drone from DJI that can avoid obstacles like a boss, as well as one that flew too close for comfort at London’s Heathrow airport. Well, it looks like drones are in the spotlight again today, with a hacker sharing a chilling claim that he is capable of hijacking a $35,000 police drone – from a distance of one mile away, now how about that?
It is not often that you hear of news that there is a piece of government property that would be taken over by someone out there, so to hear from IBM researcher Nils Rodday at the RSA security conference in San , that there are security flaws in a $35,000 drone’s radio connection is certainly surprising.
Rodday said that he is capable of take advantage of the lack of encryption between the drone and its controller module, enabling any hacker who has successfully reverse engineered the drone’s flight software, to impersonate that controller in order to send navigation commands. This was discovered while he was engaged in a drone research when he was employed by the University of Twente in the Netherlands as a graduate researcher prior to him joining up with IBM before this.
Not only that, this hack will also block every single command from the drone’s legitimate operator. Basically, whatever the original operator is capable of performing, you can, too, if you have hacked the said drone successfully. He demonstrated the proof-of-concept exploit, and thankfully, has already informed drone’s manufacturer of the discovered security flaws which will be fixed in the next hardware revision, so too bad for the existing models that remain vulnerable to such an exploit at the moment.