DJI Drone Operator’s Location Can Easily Be Intercepted

Hackers, or security researchers, have figured out how to decode the radio signals that every DJI drone sends out. This lets them know exactly where the DJI drone operator is.

At the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in San Diego last week, security researchers from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security showed how they could decode the radio signals of DJI drones.

By reverse engineering the drone’s radio protocol, called DroneID, they discovered that every DJI drone’s DroneID communications broadcast not only its own GPS location and a unique identifier but also the GPS coordinates of its operator.

This means that anyone with cheap radio hardware and access to a new software tool can intercept and decode the drone’s broadcasts to pinpoint the operator’s location, potentially posing serious security and privacy concerns.

The DroneID system (better known as DJI Aeroscope) was developed to give…