Most US Drones Still Beam Video Unencrypted

An anonymous reader writes "Four years after discovering that militants were tapping into drone video feeds, the U.S. military still hasn't secured the transmissions of more than half of its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, Danger Room has learned. The majority of the aircraft still broadcast their classified video streams 'in the clear' — without encryption. With a minimal amount of equipment and know-how, militants can see what America's drones see."

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Link is spam

[Anonymous Coward]

The real Wired article is here.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/

Re:play chess much?

[Lloyd_Bryant]

What is this some Michael Bay "the signal that hacked your network" shit? How could they detect a passive receiver?

Because the receiver ain't quite as "passive" as you think. Google for "local oscillator" for an example.

Digital systems tend to generate noise on predictable frequencies as well - if a device has a chip that's clocked at a given frequency, then somewhere in that device is an oscillator used to generate that clock (though it may or may not be working at that particular frequency).

The only truly passive receiver is one that is completely shielded to prevent it from radiating any of this noise. But you *have* to have a gap in the shielding in order for the incoming signal to be received. So building an undetectable receiver is not quite as easy as you might think.