Now there’s a way to tell if a drone is spying on someone.
Researchers have devised a method to tell what a drone is recording — without having to decrypt the video data that the device streams to the pilot’s smartphone.
This technique, described January 9 at arXiv.org, could help military bases detect unwanted surveillance and civilians protect their privacy as more commercial drones take to the skies.“People have already worked on detecting [the presence of] drones, but no one had solved the problem of, ‘Is the drone actually recording something in my direction?’” says Ahmad Javaid, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Toledo in Ohio, who was not involved in the work.
Ben Nassi, a software engineer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and colleagues realized that changing the appearance of objects in a drone’s field of view influences the stream of encrypted data the drone sends to its smartphone controller. That’s because the more pixels that change from one video frame to the next, the more data bits the drone sends per second. So rapidly switching the appearance of a person or house and seeing whether those alterations correspond to higher drone-to-phone Wi-Fi traffic can reveal whether a drone is snooping.
Nassi’s team tested this idea by covering a house window with a smart film that could switch between transparent and nearly opaque, and aiming a drone with a video camera at the window from 40 meters away. Every two seconds, the researchers…
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