Anti-Drone Fence: Science or Snakeoil?

Remember when it was laser pointers? Well, now it’s drones.

[Thinkerer] sent us this link to what’s essentially a press release for a company called Sensofusion that makes a UAV detector and (they claim) smart jammer, and apparently one is being installed at Denver International airport.

We buy that the “Airfence” system will be able to detect known systems by signature, and possibly even take them over. We’ve seen two exploits of quadcopter radio protocols (one a timing attack and the other a controller ID spoof) that would allow them to do just that. But is that the problem? Don’t most of the major manufacturers fence off airports in software these days anyway? And are drones really the droids that you’re looking for?

They also make some claims about being able to detect and stop DIY copters, but we don’t see how. Imagine that your copter ran encrypted on 2.4 GHz. How is this different from any other WiFi signal? Or imagine that it sends and receives infrequent data in the congested pager bands? And short of jamming, we don’t see how they’re going to take down anything that they don’t already understand.

So, commenteers, how would you do it? Detect and even take over an arbitrary drone? Possible or snakeoil?

Filed under: drone hacks

from Hackaday http://hackaday.com/2016/11/09/anti-drone-fence-science-or-snakeoil/
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