Drones

News Articles

I was reading the news, and I came across these two articles which talk about swarms of drones. Now, I have not seen swarms of drones. The next articles which are linked to it talks about car sized drones and drones hovering over one spots.

New Jersey Drone Swarm Spotted Coming In ‘Off the Ocean’

FBI Rep on Possibility of Threat from New Jersey Drones: ‘We Don’t Know’ – Newsweek

My Observations

Now, I’ve seen some large drones. I’ve for sure seen drones. I’ve certainly seen what I strongly believe are drones hovering in my area. Just like some of the residents said the drones will be visible at night with blinking navigation lights just sitting in the sky over one point.

I can’t say for certain what I’m seeing is drones but they do have a very fast velocity and quick agility just like a drone could be. I’ve seen one drop altitude, raise altitude, go in reverse, and then hover so fast it seemed like it would have given any occupants whiplash. This makes me think it was unmanned.

I’ve also seen multiple of these UFOs at the same time circling my area or some area nearby. I’m going to use the word UFO because I don’t really know if these are drones, unmanned, or manned craft.

Now, I’ve heard one fly overhead about twice and it has a distinct lightweight buzzing sound. I’ve caught just a bare glimpse of one once that flew over and it appeared to be larger than a normal store bought drone.

What I Think They Could Be Doing

I know I’ve ranted on and on about HDMI/DisplayPort/VGA/video-signal decoding from afar. But I’m convinced it is happening. I’m convinced it is happening to me. Now, I don’t have any good information the drone or drones are doing it, but they’ve been in the area when I’m sure it was happening.

It is possible these cars sized or larger than normal drones are hovering listening to EMI from devices located in buildings, homes, and maybe some of these military sites.

It is also possible these drones are scanning these areas using advanced wall penetrating radar. Allowing them to image the inside of buildings, people, and such other things. The hovering in one spot may be behavior that allows the wall penetrating radar to average over time to develop a better picture. The frequency of interest may be around 13-ghz from some information I have.

There are also a lot of other emissions these drones could be listening for. This is a really active field of research but there have been cases where exfiltration of data and encryption keys have happened with EMI over short distances. These drones may be hovering over sensitive sites allowing them to be in range to conduct these types of behaviors.

Tools and Methods for Defense

I’ve got a tool called HDCPEnabler on my website. The link is below. There is also a link to the source code. You can compile it yourself using the free Visual Studio tools from Microsoft.

Content Protection Enabler – KM4KFL.SITE

Now, that tool will encrypt the HDMI and DisplayPort signals. I’ve got information that isn’t strong but enough to say it does increase the difficulty and it might thwart these drones from observing these signals. I’ve also got information that a land-based method exists to overcome the encryption.

You can also create noise between 70-mhz and 1-ghz which covers some of the spectrum that most of these video devices release emissions in that can be used to recover the image on screens. I’ve got limited information this method works very well when the encryption is enabled. Creating 0.5 second CW emissions at a uniform random distribution between 70e6 and 1e9 seems to work. You need 3 of these going to be effective from my testing. A power level of about 20mW on each transmitter is sufficient because the actual signal they are looking for is really weak to begin with. It doesn’t take much to trash the signal enough that they can’t get a good decode of the HDCP handshake and bit stream.