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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."
Does the system involve increasing penalties for people that screw with your delivery drones?
could be a cable show.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
yeah they take disposable drones designed to fight people who don't have indoor plumbing and who film their propaganda on vhs camcorders, and they try to use that against Russian hackers. That's like hiring convenience store robbers to steal gold from fort knox.
lucm, indeed.
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
A hacker can circumvent. We have learned this lesson time and time again.
No, we are presented with this lesson time and time again...
It would seem many are incapable of actually learning it.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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 my drone override transmitter that is already jamming GPS just needs to impersonate more than at least half the drones in range?
Along with all the local wifi hotspots, ssids, repeaters, device MAC addresses, etc. (including their spatial relationships to each other) that Google Maps just went ahead and logged. If I had to set this whole "out of sight flight" thing up that is one database that would get a lot of updates. People have put radio beacons everywhere, it would be a shame not to at least check in and say hello 60 times a day...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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
Trump will ship better drones to Russia now to fight 'evil' Ukraine.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-23/trump-aide-partnered-with-firm-run-by-man-with-alleged-kgb-ties
"Subu Kota, who pleaded guilty in 1996 to selling the material to an FBI agent posing as a Russian spy, is one of two board directors at the company, Boston-based Brainwave Science. During years of federal court proceedings, prosecutors presented evidence they said showed that between 1985 and 1990 Kota met repeatedly with a KGB agent and was part of a spy ring that made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling U.S. missile defense technology to Russian spies. Kota denied being part of a spy ring, reached a plea agreement in the biotech case and admitted to selling a sketch of a military helicopter to his co-defendant, who was later convicted of being a KGB operative."
One of those business partners suspected of being a Russian agent is one "Micheal Flynn", Trumps new national security advisor.
You might want to read up on how aircraft navigated before GPS (and still do, to some extent). In addition to ATC beacons, RDF (radio direction finding) off of commercial AM broadcasting stations was and is a thing. Triangulating from two isn't that hard for a human, it's a trivial task for a computer. Good luck overriding the signals from a few multi-kilowatt commercial broadcast towers.
-- Alastair
If somebody is shooting stuff at the drone, they've got a pretty good chance of taking it down if they keep at it. At which point, what's more valuable, the $50 package, or the $5,000 drone?
This isn't really a problem for the customer, Amazon knows they didn't get their package, and can take the appropriate action (refund, dispatch another drone, dispatch a same-day-delivery driver, dispatch a regular delivery, etc.) But from their perspective, it's probably better to let the thief have the package and be able to recover the drone. Besides, the drone might end up with pretty good video footage of the thief that it can give to the police.
So according to this corporate influenced media outlet, Flynn worked at the same company as a guy who was a spy, and therefore might also be a spy. Never mind that he is the expert in security, rose to director of Defense Intelligence, and was trusted for more than three decades since the spying before Obama fired him over policy disagreements.
This is the same article that accuses him of spreading Internet conspiracies for daring to say *gasp* "Fear of Muslims is rational."
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...
It was amusing.
For those with IQ's beneath a certain threshold, I bet it was almost as funny as Talladega Nights.
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
RQ-11 Raven is a fixed-wing aircraft, not a multirotor. It takes years of hard training to prepare a good pilot for a fixed-wing aircraft.
For example, more US aircraft were lost in WWII due to crash landing, especially on carriers, than to an enemy fire.
If one buys any fixed-wing RPAS and starts flying it without a prior experience, he/she will crash it before long. That is what happening most probably.
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.
The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is hilarious. If you can't see past the surface to find the satire, the problem lies with you. It's not as good as Austin Powers, however.
Don't worry - there's an infinite supply of drone from the 3 scripted puppets on the show.
For those wondering: TGT is awful and forced. Yes, TG was scripted to hell, but TGT is scripted and pathetic.
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...
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.
Are they establishing a national socialist system of industrial-government coordination?
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.
Getting super far off topic, but if the funniest of the three doesn't meet your criteria to be your favorite...what other criteria are you using?
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.
There is a pretty huge difference between firing at a drone and firing at a human. Willingness to do the former in no manner, way, shape, or form implies willingness to do the latter.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
It's almost as good as forgetting that other nations - like Tsarist Russia - did it too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
So my drone override transmitter that is already jamming GPS just needs to impersonate more than at least half the drones in range?
Along with all the local wifi hotspots, ssids, repeaters, device MAC addresses, etc. (including their spatial relationships to each other) that Google Maps just went ahead and logged. If I had to set this whole "out of sight flight" thing up that is one database that would get a lot of updates. People have put radio beacons everywhere, it would be a shame not to at least check in and say hello 60 times a day...
Also, he's confusing "jamming" with "impersonating." His "drone override transmitter" (whatever the fuck that is) can do one, or the other...but not both. And he should note that he'd need to be doing this across a LOT of spectrum...and eventually the FCC is going to find his ass as a result because as soon as GPS stops working, the drone shifts to other methods of navigating until it gets out of range of the jammer.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
"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."
FCC? I'd be more worried about the U.S. Air Force, you know, the people that maintain the GPS network.
Those people have some very serious drones, and no one wants a delivery from one of them...
And, seeing they are part of Cyber Command, they most likely have a pretty good bead on, well, everything.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Charm, originality, satire, etc.
The first movie was intentionally campy and self aware, and it had a genuine charm to it (along with great music and musical cameos). The second movie lost all of that and doubled down on the crude humor. I enjoy the crude humor, but it can't carry the whole film unless you're 12 years old. I felt the third movie was the funniest, largely in part due to Nigel Powers and the relationship between Austin, Dr. Evil, and Nigel. It got some of the charm back as well.
That's the whole point, though. If the drone lands and the thieves take the package, the drone can be recovered. If the drone just lets them keep shooting at it, the drone will crash and be damaged (potentially beyond repair), and the thieves still get the package.
It's better to lose the $50 package than have the $5000 drone be destroyed.
It sounds like you'd end up with the police doing the same to you. Just on matter of principle.
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?