Friday, June 29, 2012

Scientists 'hack' Drifting Drone

American researchers took manage of a drifting worker by "hacking" in to its GPS network - behaving on a $1,000 (640) brave from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

A University of Texas at Austin group used "spoofing" - a technique where the worker mistakes the vigilance from hackers is to a sent from GPS satellites.

The same way might have been used to bring down a US worker in Iran in 2011.

Analysts say that the demo shows the promising risk of using drones.

Drones are unmanned aircraft, frequently tranquil from a heart located thousands of kilometres away.

They are mostly used by the army in strife zones such as Afghanistan.

Todd Humphreys and his colleagues from the Radionavigation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin hacked the GPS network of a worker belonging to the university.

They demonstrated the technique to DHS officials, using a mini helicopter drone, flown over a track in Austin, mentioned Fox News, who pennyless the story .

"What if you could take down a of these drones delivering FedEx packages and use that as your missile?" Fox News quoted Mr Humphreys.

"That's the same character the 911 enemy had."

The spoofed worker used an unencrypted GPS signal, that is routinely used by municipal planes, says Noel Sharkey, co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.

"It's easy to travesty an unencrypted drone. Anybody technically expert could do this - it would cost them a few 700 is to apparatus and that's it," he told BBC News.

"It's really dangerous - if a worker is being destined someplace using its GPS, [a spoofer] can make it regard it's someplace else and make it collision in to a building, or collision someplace else, or only rob it and expand it with explosives and send somewhere.

"But the large fret is - it moreover means that it wouldn't be as well hard for [a really expert person] to work out how to un-encrypt army drones and travesty them, and that could be exceedingly dangerous since they could spin them on the incorrect people.

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