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How to tell if a drone is stalking you

Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News for Students

flying drone — A new technique can show when a sneaky robot is streaming video of you or your home.

Now there’s a way to tell if you’re being spied on by eyes from the sky.

Researchers have developed a method to find out what a drone — a flying robot — is recording.

And they can tell without having to translate the video information that the device is streaming to its pilot. This technique, described January 9 on the site arXiv.org, could help military bases detect unwanted robotic snoops. It also could help civilians protect their privacy as more drones take to the air.

“People have already worked on detecting [the presence of] drones,” says Ahmad Javaid. He studies cybersecurity — or how to keep computers secure from spies — at the University of Toledo in Ohio. “But no one had solved the problem of, ‘Is the drone actually recording something in my direction?’”

Ben Nassi is a software engineer. That’s someone who develops computer programs. He works in Israel at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The images streaming from a drone are made up of tiny lighted areas, called pixels. Nassi’s group realized it could change how objects look to a drone. When something it’s recording changes (say, switches to a different color), the stream of encrypted data that the drone broadcasts to a computer (that controls it) also will change. (Encrypted data are those that have been put into a secret code.)

The drone sends those data via Wi-Fi. When the pixels change color, the data need to change, too.

The more pixels that change from one video frame to the next, the more data the drone sends per second. So if a scientist could rapidly switch the appearance of a person or house, the drone’s pixel information would switch as well. That would require more data. And the scientists could then track whether the appearance changes corresponded to higher drone-to-phone Wi-Fi traffic. If they do, that suggests the drone might be recording you.