New technique could help spot snooping drones
Prototype may deter undesired surveillance
FLYING SPY A new method could reveal whether a suspicious, camera-equipped drone is snooping on you or your home.
newnow/Shutterstock
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
