LOL sorry brother, sometimes I make assumptions about what folks know or don't know. I think I know what you're alluding to.
'Manned' Interception of Unmanned Aircraft Systems
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dragonfire
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While the Iranian claims of having hacked the American drone has been widely discredited, i remember reading that in Iraq the video from a drone was apparently accessed via 'off-shelf' software.
The question is How plausible is the concept of 'hacking' a red drone and bringing it down safely or to use it any which way ?
The question is How plausible is the concept of 'hacking' a red drone and bringing it down safely or to use it any which way ?
Coming from someone who knows very little about drones specifically, not to mention such comms at all let alone the military type, my wild speculation:
There are so many variables to consider that it's hard to know without talking about a specific scenario. There are two main methods that I can imagine:
1) The first (and ideal if you could pull it off) would be to actually take control properly in the true sense - to tell it what to do directly. Firstly there is the issue of encryption, which is no small issue. Is the encryption of a strength (and decrypting capabilities of the opposing force) such that it would take years to find the key? Days? Minutes?
And then how do you know you've found the key? Is the data in a format such that it's recognisable, or is it encoded or obfuscated such that you really couldn't be sure you've cracked it? That could be determined by whether that layer was purpose built or used common commercial protocols, too. And on top of that would be whether it was a known drone model with known underlying protocols and simply an unknown encryption/key (both sides have the same systems), or the whole system is an unknown.
And related to the above, assuming you can crack the encryption, you've then got to work out what the inputs are. If the data is minimal ("should" be, but you'd expect prototypes to be a little more sloppy) then you need to figure out what bytes are what inputs, and that wouldn't be easy (again, if the data structure is more self-descriptive then things change). Do you watch the inputs and the drones movements? Send your own inputs and watch it? Could you even do this in the time frame of a single occurrence? And hopefully they haven't been smart enough to put in a sanity check on the data to detect obvious spoofing of data (i.e. checksums that don't match up). This assumes there is much that can be input at this stage anyway - is the drones mission pretty much set before flight, or can it be controlled in a detailed manner afterwards?
Personally I'd be surprised if, even WITHOUT encryption present, it could easily be pulled off with a clever enough data structure/protocol in place - you'd expect it to take multiple attempts, at which point they would hopefully realise what's happening.
2) You could do what it appears the Iranians claim, and that's spoof the inputs. I don't know enough about radio and GPS to even speculate on that. I do know however that a drone could have sanity checks on its inputs, whether it be positional changes over time being within possible values, or comparisons to other sensors etc.
The most likely scenario to me seems to be #2 but more like a simple jamming situation - force the drone into a fail-safe, where it might go until it can re-establish inputs/comms, and result in it being brought down.
My guess would be that it's quite difficult
I doubt that anyone that knows much about actual drones will give any kind of reply.