Military and civilian drones have a critical weakness that makes them vulnerable to hacking, Katia Moskvitch discovers. So, what could a stolen drone be used for?
If you were watching Iranian state TV in early December 2011, you would have seen an unusual flying object displayed to viewers. It was windowless, squat, with a pointed nose, and its two wings gave it the shape of a manta ray. The trophy on display was an RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone, a key tool in the intelligence-gathering arsenal of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Standing in a hangar on a military airfield, the drone appeared undamaged. Iranian officials insisted it had not been shot down; instead, they claimed an unusual achievement: hacking the drone while it was flying near Iran’s border over Afghanistan and forcing it to land.
Outside Iran, many were skeptical upon hearing such claims. Todd Humphreys, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas in Austin, was one of the doubters. However, he would soon prove himself wrong.
So, how easy is it to hack a drone? Could the military, police, and private citizens also lose control of their aircraft? And if so, what could a hacker do with a stolen drone?
One way to hack a drone is by interfering with its navigation system. US military drones use encrypted GPS frequencies, which was the RQ-170’s weak point, according to the Iranians. They first jammed its communication links, disconnecting it from ground controllers and forcing it to switch to autopilot; this also disrupted the secure data flow from the GPS satellites. The drone then had to search for unencrypted GPS frequencies typically used by commercial aircraft. At this point, the Iranians claimed they used a technique called “spoofing” – sending the drone false GPS coordinates, tricking it into thinking it was near its home base in Afghanistan. As a result, it landed on Iranian territory, right into the hands of its captors.