Spoofing drone GPS signal is real danger

Fox News:

A small surveillance drone flies over an Austin stadium, diligently following a series of GPS waypoints that have been programmed into its flight computer. By all appearances, the mission is routine. 

Suddenly, the drone veers dramatically off course, careering eastward from its intended flight path. A few moments later, it is clear something is seriously wrong as the drone makes a hard right turn, streaking toward the south. Then, as if some phantom has given the drone a self-destruct order, it hurtles toward the ground. Just a few feet from certain catastrophe, a safety pilot with a radio control saves the drone from crashing into the field. 

From the sidelines, there are smiles all around over this near-disaster. Professor Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas at Austin's Radionavigation Laboratory have just completed a successful experiment: illuminating a gaping hole in the government’s plan to open US airspace to thousands of drones. 

They could be turned into weapons. 

“Spoofing a GPS receiver on a UAV is just another way of hijacking a plane,” Humphreys told Fox News. 

In other words, with the right equipment, anyone can take control of a GPS-guided drone and make it do anything they want it to.

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...... With his device -- what Humphreys calls the most advanced spoofer ever built (at a cost of just $1,000) -- he infiltrates the GPS system of the drone with a signal more powerful than the one coming down from the satellites orbiting high above the earth.  

Initially, his signal matches that of the GPS system so the drone thinks nothing is amiss. That’s when he attacks -- sending his own commands to the onboard computer, putting the drone at his beck and call. 

Humphreys says the implications are very serious. “In 5 or 10 years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” he told Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”
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Humphreys next task should be to design a system that will stop the spoofing, identifying where it is coming from and alone the drone to target it.  It is the best way to defeat these kind of attacks.  Another approach would be to code the GPS signal to the drone in such a way that someone without the code would not be able to spoof the system.

We are going to be relying on ever more deadly drones in the comeing years and we have to get a handle on this problem.