Can someone explain this to me like I'm five, because what I'm taking from "unencrypted GPS data" is that the military controls these drones by basically pushing coordinates, and gaining control could be as simple as broadcasting your signal a heck of a lot louder?
Reuters[1] published a correction clarifying that the UAV in question was owned by the university. It wasn't a military drone. The article on Sophos[2] site also says this.
Military GPS signals are encrypted[3]. 'Hijacking' a drone that relies on the civilian signal is an interesting technical accomplishment but offers no progress towards doing the same thing to an aircraft using the military band.
GPS receivers receive very weak signals from the GPS satellites, there is no way to boost the signal. GPS receivers use these signals to determine their location. There is nothing (except the law) to stop an attacker from building an array of transmitters to broadcast signals which emulate the GPS signals. Careful manipulation of attacker's bogus signals could be used to fool the aircraft's navigation controller.
There are phases of the flight where the drone is flying automatically. Also if the connection to the command center is cut, the drone flys automatically.
Thus to hack a drone, you need to:
(1) Cut its connection to the command center.
(2) Shout louder than the GPS satellites, and shout data
that will confuse the drone into being in a location
it is not, trying to get it to move where you want.
You can do (1) by just shouting random crap over the control frequency.
If I understand it correctly, the actual communications link between the drone and whoever is controlling it may be encrypted and uncompromised but all a hijacker needs to do is spoof the GPS signals itself coming from the satellites by, as you said, broadcasting alternate signals more powerfully in the vicinity of the drone.
Please correct me if I am wrong - but is the last sentence in the article completely wrong?
" It is currently illegal to use drone aircraft in US airspace without special clearance from the FAA, and it might take a little longer than expected for that to change. "
Nope. Unmanned aircraft currently have to have a line of sight to the operator and stay below 400 feet unless they have an exemption from the FAA. NPR did a story on this a week ago [0], which also has a link to the FAA's status page for unmanned aircraft [1]
I find it a little strange that they outsourced penetration testing like this. (Although maybe they already understood the system's vulnerabilities and wanted to see how hard it was for someone else to do it.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212319