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Amazon Patents System To Defend Drones Against Hackers, Jammers and Arrows (geekwire.com)
As Amazon prepares its drone-based delivery service Prime Air for the United States, the company has been looking for ways to keep its drones safe while they're flying to and from their destinations. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the company has patented a plan that lays out countermeasures for potential threats ranging from computer hacking to lightning flashes to bows and arrows. GeekWire reports: The "compromise system" that Amazon's engineers propose relies on an array of sensors to orient the drone based on the sun's position in the sky, if need be. That's in case the drone gets confused by, say, lightning or a muzzle flash. The system also provides for a mesh network, in which drones would check with each other and other data sources -- including satellite signals -- to verify the readings they're following. If there's a discrepancy in the data, the drone would tally up the verdicts from all of the sources available, then go with the majority opinion. The onboard compromise system would be designed to keep the drone on track even if someone tried jamming its communication system. And if the drone became completely disoriented, it would be programmed to land safely and broadcast its location to its handlers. Now, about those arrows: Amazon lays out a scenario in which an attacker shoots an arrow at a drone in the air. "The malicious person may be attempting to cause the UAV to fall to ground, so that that malicious person may steal or destroy the UAV," the application reads. This is what Amazon suggests would happen: "The compromise module detects the presence of the arrow and generates the UAV compromise data indicating that a threat exists that may compromise the UAV. The fail-safe module terminates the navigation to the first computing device, and the fail-safe module directs the UAV towards the ground. In some implementations, the fail-safe module may be configured to direct the UAV to take evasive maneuvers, navigate to a safe landing or parking zone for inspect, and so forth."
"Millions of dollars' worth of U.S.-supplied drones that Kiev had hoped would help in its war against Russian-backed separatists have proven ineffective against jamming and hacking, Ukrainian officials say."
They have shark-mounted lasers attached.
Bwuhahahahaha
Considering that there are people who will steal packages right off a person's doorstep, it's not out of the question for these drones to be attacked just to get their cargo. Amazon's going to have to take that into consideration. Having the drone land itself the moment it's attacked is just going to make the thefts that much easier to carry out.
Does the system involve increasing penalties for people that screw with your delivery drones?
could be a cable show.
They seem to loose a drone every intro.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
A hacker can circumvent. We have learned this lesson time and time again.
So my drone override transmitter that is already jamming GPS just needs to impersonate more than at least half the drones in range?
Not a problem. And as a bonus, I can have the fake drones vote to route every real drone nearby into the back of my unmarked truck.
Any of them object and a quick barrage of arrows with sticky heads and heavy weights or cables should do the trick. Make em' land, nab the drone and the goods. Off you go.
Should probably patent that.
"Anti-drone delivery system" for your off-grid shelter.
After all, you can't really tell the difference between the trojan gubment drone spraying them mind controlling chem trails and an emergency ammo delivery if you can't get the drone before it gets you.
What about eagles?
They are trying to defend against Hawkeye.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
and the fail-safe module directs the UAV towards the ground
And right into the thief's hands... nice plan.
Wouldn't that make the thing easier to steal?
This is not a novel invention.
This is trivially obvious from hitting the problem 'I am deploying lots of drones'.
All of the above solutions are obvious and un-novel and in no way not obvious from prior art.
I'd think a muzzle flash would be trivially disorienting compared to the subsequent impact by a high speed projectile...
#DeleteChrome
I'd love to have a drone with machine guns to take out other drones. Maybe an armed RC plane.
Katniss Everdeen can shoot fighter jets out of the sky with arrows. What makes you think you puny drones will be able to do any better?
So it's safety measures are to land, which means then thieves no longer need to check doors for packages, they can just threaten the UAV's with arrows. Granted some idiots shooting arrows in the sky isn't a comforting thought...
Be seeing you...
One can get an "and so forth" patent?
I need an attorney, to patent a simple invention which will "improve life, the universe and everything" using innovation, science, technology, "and so forth." It will be fundamental to any possible future patent. I'll be rich!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Granted some idiots shooting arrows in the sky isn't a comforting thought...
I used to be a drone, but then I took an arrow to the knee.
How about GUNS?
And if the drone became completely disoriented, it would be programmed to land safely and broadcast its location to its handlers.
Get (or observe) a few drone deliveries and do some SIGINT collection with an RTL-SDR to ID the freq range and strength of the drone's transmissions.
Once you do have a method to force a landing (which doesn't seem easy, BTW), broadcast with a cheap-ish SDR (probably a HackRF or the new LimeSDR) and a power amplifier to jam the drone's distress call.
Steal the drone and its cargo. Disable the drone's comms and sell on the black market.
What sort of stuff are they delivering with drones anyway? Gaming laptops? Gaming consoles? Either are pretty high value targets and easy to flip on the black/grey market, I would think...
I'm going to dress in green tights and a feather cap, get out my bow and arrow and call myself "Robbin' Goods".
To those on Slashdot aroused by the thought, you I will deem my Band of Fairy Men. You can stay inside and, uh, "support" me from afar k thanks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Amazon is worried about somebody using a BOW AND ARROW to shoot at their drones? Wake up dipshits, they're going to use shotguns and maybe rifles. Nobody is going to use a damn arrow.
Replace UAV with any other computer system or sensor (including software systems/agents) and all you've got is good general reliability techniques and stuff I learned in my first robotics class and first distributed systems class in college. Everything should be obvious to someone in the art.
We really need patent reform.
I'm shocked, shocked , to find that Amazon is filing frivolous patents.
If I start seeing drones filling the sky near my property, I'll take up falconry and train them to take the things the fuck out.
Fuck your shit.
What has been described above is a simple way for someone with a bunch of arrows to force the drone to land, after which the package it carries can be stolen. It won't have the same security as the drone, after all!
Keep It Simple Stupid!!!
The more features they add to protect against things that may not even happen - the more vulnerable the system will be.
Gotta love technical patents like this. A literal blueprint for hackers. I predict this will be utterly worthless about 17 seconds after it's implemented.
Gee, if we only had real punishments for those found guilty of attacking drones instead of wasting millions trying to patent the inevitable.
Actual deterrents against criminal behavior. What a novel fucking idea...
Oh Skyrim!
The scary thought is that a drone has knees at all . . . what?
My employer has been experimenting with delivery by drone and the unexpected lesson learned is the major obstacle to success is bird attack.
Bird populations are dropping fast world-wide. Whatever technology Amazon puts in place, you can be certain it will kill birds and hasten the rush to extinction.
Did they call it "Skynet"?
Diversity receivers aren't hard to come by, you can buy them off-the-shelf. You can get just a diversity hub into which all your receivers plug, and they can be of disparate types.
Sun trackers are harder. The easiest way to do it is probably with a camera with a filter on, by burning CPU cycles. But you could do it with just a whole bunch of light intensity sensors at different angles. But but, that's what a camera is, and maybe they have cycles to burn.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wonder what happens if someone setup set of stone lights and flashes them at once, telling the drone "Did you see all the muzzle flashes? Hey, yo have incoming bullets from all directions!" yes, i realize a muzzle flash looks different from a strobe but will the programming and optical systems be sophisticated enough to tell the difference? Even if you don't actually cause it to land, I an see people disorienting them just for the yucks, and Amazon pushing to apply laws against attacks against a/c to drones or new legislation.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I would volunteer as a drone safe house in emergency. This gets me $10.00 off of my Prime Membership. Since one of us is always home, we could watch the drone until the Drone Tenders from Amazon arrive.
for crying out loud
But what if they had curved swords? Curved! Swords!
I built a proof of concept and took down my drone that was flying at 150' in my yard. It was fun. I'm pretty that a delivery drone can not out manuver a rocket propelled net dispersion system.
Why don't you just mug the UPS/FedEx/etc delivery person?
They are already on the ground and you only need to threaten them with a weapon, not actually use it.
What about nets, like fishing nets?
Maybe thinking about this is a bad thing.
Might be ok if someone open sourced it so it wouldn't lead to a power imbalance but killing people with drones is pretty problematic so even then it's not a good thing.
Think a bit Slashdot, nerds aren't for evil.
Unless they work for Microsoft.
Or the pay is really good.
Or it's just too cool.
Commercial and consumer drones are a nuisance and they should all be destroyed.
I'd give you an internet tough guy point but I'm all out after the holidays.
When I first read the OP, it didn't make sense. A drone being "confused" by a muzzle flash? What kind of idiot thinks that's how a drone navigates...or that a muzzle flash would be more confusing than light reflecting off a window or a pond? So I dug in...and the actual patent application is what you should really read because it's very cool. The article about the patent application itself is very poorly-written; either the author didn't really read the patent app or didn't understand it.
The underlying problem is this: people will screw with drones that are delivering valuable items. They will shoot at them with objects ranging from thrown stones to bullets from firearms. They will use signal jammers, spoofing of navigational or control systems and maybe even malware that compromises a device that's used to provide guidance. They've put together a pretty clever approach to each of these problems.
For kinetic threats, a system that would detect the attack would trigger one of a few possible reactions. One reaction is the emission of foam to cushion the drone from the direction of the threat. This would temporarily degrade its flight performance, but only on an as-needed basis. Another would be avoidance, if possible.
For (using the USAF definition) cyber threats, they get really clever. GPS is a nightmare against a moderately-capable attacker; spoofing and jamming are pretty much impossible to defend against. The current gold standard is a device called a SAASM...but there's a catch. It's only available to military users of GPS, and no commercial equivalent exists. It depends upon cryptographic keys to use the privileged GPS functions, so even if you could build your own you could not make use of it. And this is the other interesting/tricky threat.
So, you're humming along and minding your own business using GPS to navigate when...aha! Someone jams you. Or they spoof GPS and try to get you to crash into the ground so that they can take your goodies. You will notice one of these happening when you suddenly lose GPS signal...and the other when your speed and course suddenly vary wildly without you having done anything to cause such.
Amazon has put together a really smart mutli-layered approach to this kind of threat. I won't dig into the details, but some of the goodies include mesh networking, using a variety of alternate methods as points of reference (including even the signal jammer itself, if jamming is going on) and a broad range of different frequencies so that all-encompassing jamming or spoofing becomes a serious, serious pain in the ass for the attacker to accomplish.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Just wait till UPS finishes its cutting edge stealth fighter/delivery drones (CODENAME: STOLEN) then we will see who rules the skies. There's also the Fed-Ex experimental air-to-air "Logistical Orbital Spearhead Targeter", (LOST) . USPS is gonna have to back to the drawing board though, looks like the surface-to-air "Malicious Operator Radio Equipped Ballista System" (MOREBS) is going to need a redesign.
So far though, its the underdog, 7/11, who rules the skies with their own system, the "Neighborhood Orbiting Grip and Ship" (NOGAS) The hot Coffee payload and secondary microwaved burrito launcher seem deterrent enough....... for now.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
"If someone shoots an arrow at the drone, try to avoid it. Or maybe land. Or maybe run away." It's nothing but a vague statement of the problem and some goals you might want to aim for. If they actually gave a detailed algorithm for evading arrows, that might be patentable. But this is just nonsense. They're saying, "We should have exclusive ownership of the concept of trying to avoid arrows because we were the first to file a patent application pointing out it could be a problem."
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Now, about those arrows: Amazon lays out a scenario in which an attacker shoots an arrow at a drone in the air. "The malicious person may be attempting to cause the UAV to fall to ground, so that that malicious person may steal or destroy the UAV," the application reads.
Then:
The fail-safe module terminates the navigation to the first computing device, and the fail-safe module directs the UAV towards the ground.
So if someone tries to down the UAV with an arrow, the UAV lands?
Who really wants a world in which the skies are filled with delivery drones? It all seems ridiculous to me.
My only WTF question is:
If they've invented a way to defend against all these things, and they think it's so great, why patent it? Why make it so no one else can defend their drones using the same methods? Why do we allow this? What possible benefit from having a patent could there be? It is shown time and again that the only thing they do is provide false scarcity so some jackass can maintain a monopoly for no reason.
The OP says that if the drone becomes completely disoriented, it would be programmed to land safely. That sounds good, but I hope that means more than just making an attempt to auto-land, I.E. slowly descend until it touches down. This is because there is nothing to say that the drone could not become disoriented over a busy highway, a crowd of people, or other location where a drone would pose a hazard. A drone that descends in front of a tractor trailer on a busy highway while attempting to "land safely" would be a huge safety hazard. If the drone is disoriented, that means it does not know where it is. This makes it quite difficult for it to "land safely" autonomously.
So if I wanted to knock a drone out of the air, I don't even need to hit it? I can simply throw something towards it and it will voluntarily land itself?
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
They've put together a pretty clever approach to each of these problems.
For kinetic threats, a system that would detect the attack would trigger one of a few possible reactions. One reaction is the emission of foam to cushion the drone from the direction of the threat. This would temporarily degrade its flight performance, but only on an as-needed basis. Another would be avoidance, if possible.
The obvious threat will be capture ie a projectile net to catch the drone and its payload, or if you see one landing at your neighbours, you pop next door and take their stuff and/or smash the drone for shits and giggles.
Other risks are injuries to unsuspecting pets/children, or accidents (the crash rate will be above zero),
How will these be handled?