Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Relying on GPS or any external source of navigational data is risky. I cannot believe the vehicle didn't have working inertial navigation that would clearly indicate the GPS was off by quite a lot.

Simple rule - if you have no contact with home and your GPS says you are a couple hundred miles away from where your inertial navigation, your compass and all visual cues (if cruise missiles have it, so should this bird) tell you should be, something is definitely fishy and you should self destruct.

Spoofing GPS signals is an interesting idea, but falling for them continues to be unacceptable for a UAV full of very sensitive information.

View on HN

Oh good. I can make drones self destruct with a gps spoofer.

Careful, you might trigger its berserker mode.

really? I wonder how hard it is to get one near the launch site!!

i am also confused about the emphasis on GPS (see my comment), but i would guess that restricting the technology used in these things keeps the price down. GPS is good enough to label images, and probably good enough to guide something flying at a moderate altitude. it may have made more sense to keep these things (relatively) cheap (that also means if they are lost, there is less technology lost too).

It's probably just "failure of imagination" in preventing this hack - inertial navigation tech isn't exactly new (was pioneered in WWII and really came to age building ballistic missile navigation systems) so I doubt cost/classified technology would be a factor. It's just sad because having an intertial navigation system and a GPS system working to agree with each other or else some fallback (inertial homeward bound since that's an internal system, your accuracy would be off but it'd get back to friendly territory at least) would have prevented an attack like this (I believe at least - please tell me if I'm wrong).

Found this through a quick Google search - "DIY drones" http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/autopilot-system-for-full-...

I'm not sure what hardware in the system is really making the Iranian's mouths water - obviously the stealth tech has to have a great monetary and military value...I wonder how much the internals of this system compare to a predator drone that they already have captured many of as the article stated.

Perhaps they are hoping they can crack the communication channels

I'm also very curious about this. Even though this is a cheaper drone, some simple voting scheme should be in place with multiple inertial nav systems. That seems fairly typical in the UAV world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com