Anti-Drone defenses?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by giant.robot

Likewise drones, especially the type in OP's video, don't need remote control. They can be launched from arbitrary locations and then home in on GPS coordinates and then move to some terminal phase guidance like facial recognition. It also wouldn't be terribly difficult to have them home on a particular Bluetooth or WiFi MAC addresses in people's phones. Don't forget cruise missiles are a thing and have been for decades.

Cruise missiles are big. That means communications and computer hardware are a tiny burden on them, and they can have lots of range.

Mouse-sized quad-copters have to pay a lot more, proportionately, for GPS homing or anything else. They can plausibly afford that, perhaps.

What they definitely cannot afford is the ability to be launched from "arbitrary locations". Being tiny means it's hard to go fast, it's hard to fight wind, and even in still air they can't have that much range.

Originally Posted by giant.robot

For autonomous drones the only defense would be physical ones. You can't just magically hack something remotely. Swarms of tiny slow drones would be the hardest to deal with due to the sheer numbers involved. Being small and cheap they could just Zerg rush their target and overwealm anything but solid physical defenses (thick walls, armor, etc).

Being small means being slow with little possibility of physical defense of their own. They'd be massacred by microwave disruptors or birdshot. Obviously that's not a guarantee of defender victory, but there are things you can do other than try to hide in a sealed box.

Originally Posted by giant.robot

For killing power tiny drones could have small explosives behind formed penetrators essentially being single shot high powered guns.

Doesn't seem feasible to be high powered, if they're tiny. Of course, it doesn't take 'high powered' to kill a human.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by starslayer

A flyswatter or butterfly net will take care of the rest as of that point.

The video touches specifically on the evasion capabilities of the units, so no human-wielded flyswatters would be effective unless the swatters were hidden from the drones. That could be a thing, as the units look too small to have enough power to run active sensors for any length of time.


so your best defenses are, 1) shield window panes with bars, denying drones the ability to clear a drone-sized hole, 2) blackout areas under assault so the optics cant see to maneuver or attack, 3) physical obstructions in the dark to damage, ensnare, or exclude the flyers during their short endurances.

[DataPacRat]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

The video touches specifically on the evasion capabilities of the units, so no human-wielded flyswatters would be effective unless the swatters were hidden from the drones. That could be a thing, as the units look too small to have enough power to run active sensors for any length of time.


so your best defenses are, 1) shield window panes with bars, denying drones the ability to clear a drone-sized hole, 2) blackout areas under assault so the optics cant see to maneuver or attack, 3) physical obstructions in the dark to damage, ensnare, or exclude the flyers during their short endurances.

In the original video, I think I saw some of the breacher bots land on walls instead of barred windows.

3e's Robots implies that night-vision only adds a modest cost to optical sensors; so instead of merely turning off the lights, some sort of smoke-grenades might be more useful. (There are even civilian versions already available, advertised for use in paintball games. Couldn't tell you how effective they actually are, though.)

If we're still using 4e Ultra-Tech's robo-bugs as the base chassis, they have a standard endurance of 1 hour before needing a recharge. As best as I can figure, they have a flying Move of 20 mph, and their radios have a range of 1 mile; so they can be launched from quite a distance from wherever the target is, and still have enough range left to go find a pre-planted charging point of some sort.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by Andreas

Citation required.


Yes, that is the kind of encryption keys I'm talking about (except "impossible to use to secure drone controls during operations", I'm not sure what you mean by that, but it can be used for sending secure drone commands during operations). The keys needing to be physically transfered is not much of a problem for such communication with drones since you presumably have physical access to the drones at some point before you send them on their mission.

You are making some really strong claims here.... How about I post some data encrypted by my civilian self, and we can see if it is really that trivially easy to break.

If you have nothing that anyone wants, no one will waste the time to crack it. The majority of people are protected from cybercrimes because of their anonymity and their insignificance, but whatever Deity they worship help them if they become known and significant if they have not taken steps to secure their digital data. If you are not careful, amateur pranksters can take your car, your life, your home, your identity, your money, your reputation, and everything that matters to you without even having to leave the comfort of their home.

Take a look at the practice of Swatting, where people make fake emergency calls to get SWAT teams sent to another person's house so that they are shot dead by police, or Virtual Revenge Porn, where people use videos constructed from the online videos of the people they hate and splice them into digital porn videos before posting them online to harass and to shame the victims. These are just two minor examples of the types of cybercrimes that amateurs are capable of, and professionals are capable of so much worse. And we are not even talking about the capabilities of intelligence agencies or national militaries.

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Huh, I've never read that one. I see it's a hardcover from 1975 and that might be why. They want $65 for it too and I'm not going to read it now either. :)

It was also in the December 1973 issue of Analog, which is what I read. Don't know if the book is longer.

That said, I wasn't that impressed with it. It was an OK spy story. I do recall that they had anti-missile lockets to protect from it.

[giant.robot]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

If you have nothing that anyone wants, no one will waste the time to crack it. The majority of people are protected from cybercrimes because of their anonymity and their insignificance, but whatever Deity they worship help them if they become known and significant if they have not taken steps to secure their digital data. If you are not careful, amateur pranksters can take your car, your life, your home, your identity, your money, your reputation, and everything that matters to you without even having to leave the comfort of their home.

Take a look at the practice of Swatting, where people make fake emergency calls to get SWAT teams sent to another person's house so that they are shot dead by police, or Virtual Revenge Porn, where people use videos constructed from the online videos of the people they hate and splice them into digital porn videos before posting them online to harass and to shame the victims. These are just two minor examples of the types of cybercrimes that amateurs are capable of, and professionals are capable of so much worse. And we are not even talking about the capabilities of intelligence agencies or national militaries.

None of that backs up the original claim that encryption is easy to break.

[giant.robot]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Cruise missiles are big. That means communications and computer hardware are a tiny burden on them, and they can have lots of range.

Mouse-sized quad-copters have to pay a lot more, proportionately, for GPS homing or anything else. They can plausibly afford that, perhaps.

You can get a multi-core ARM chip with DRAM, Flash Storage, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS/GLONASS all integrated into a single chip package (system on a chip) cheap. The PHY connections for any of them are easily mounted. Consider your smartphone, the actual circuitry that powers everything is a tiny little board that takes up a fraction of its volume, the battery, chassis, and screen (plus screen circuitry) take up most of the space. Getting electronics capable of autonomous operation into the envelope of a mouse sized drone is trivial.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

What they definitely cannot afford is the ability to be launched from "arbitrary locations". Being tiny means it's hard to go fast, it's hard to fight wind, and even in still air they can't have that much range.

By arbitrary locations I mean far enough away from the target for the launcher to shoot and scoot and get away. For small drones that's a few blocks but that's enough space for someone launching a bunch from the back of a pickup or van to get moving.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Being small means being slow with little possibility of physical defense of their own. They'd be massacred by microwave disruptors or birdshot. Obviously that's not a guarantee of defender victory, but there are things you can do other than try to hide in a sealed box.

Doesn't seem feasible to be high powered, if they're tiny. Of course, it doesn't take 'high powered' to kill a human.

The point of a swarm of tiny devices is they can overwhelm defenders, the defenders need to stop every drone to succeed but the drones only need a few to get through to succeed. For buckshot or HERF guns or whatever...you'd need those weapons in place before a drone attack. The point of assassin drones launched a few blocks away would be to attack targets away from defensive positions or completely by surprise.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Civilian encryption is laughably easy to circumvent ...

"Civilian encryption," these days, is AES-256, which the NSA has approved for government information classified up to and including Top Secret. Attacking the endpoints is vastly easier then trying to break the encryption.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by giant.robot

Y

The point of a swarm of tiny devices is they can overwhelm defenders, the defenders need to stop every drone to succeed but the drones only need a few to get through to succeed. .

If 1 drone can get a kill it'll be because you're injecting botulin toxin or soemthing like that. Then you can get that 1 hit with a stealth attack and need so swarm. The swarm would actualy make you conspicuous.

[Ulzgoroth]

If the drones are attacking at extreme close range it's reasonable to expect them to be able to go for the head. That's not a one-shot guaranteed kill, but it's pretty serious so long as their armament reliably penetrates a human skull. (Countered by helmets, perhaps, but apparently people with helmets aren't the focus here. At least for giant.robot.)

Originally Posted by giant.robot

By arbitrary locations I mean far enough away from the target for the launcher to shoot and scoot and get away. For small drones that's a few blocks but that's enough space for someone launching a bunch from the back of a pickup or van to get moving.

Whether that's actually far enough to get away depends on the surveillance situation, but okay. For that value of 'arbitrary', sure...

Originally Posted by giant.robot

The point of a swarm of tiny devices is they can overwhelm defenders, the defenders need to stop every drone to succeed but the drones only need a few to get through to succeed. For buckshot or HERF guns or whatever...you'd need those weapons in place before a drone attack. The point of assassin drones launched a few blocks away would be to attack targets away from defensive positions or completely by surprise.

That's a huge narrowing of the potential use cases. While they could probably do the job, you very much don't need a swarm of killer minidrones if all you want is to be able to assassinate somebody who you can ambush, unescorted, in an unsecured area.

I suppose the drone swarm has the advantage of not needing either special skill or fanatical commitment on the part of the end-user, but on the other hand it leaves a much bigger (and weirder) material trail.

Anyway, the title of the thread is 'anti-drone defenses'. So the proposition that talking about defenses you could use against drones is missing the point seems odd.