DJI Addresses Concerns Drone Pilots’ Locations Being Public

In a short tweet, DJI responded to concerns about drone pilots’ locations being available to the public through the use of software and a cheap radio.

Last week, we reported that security researchers or hackers had discovered a way to decode the radio signals that each DJI drone emits. This enables them to pinpoint the location of the DJI drone operator.

Security researchers from Ruhr University Bochum and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security demonstrated how to decode DJI drone radio signals at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) in San Diego.

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

This means that anyone with access to the software and cheap radio hardware can intercept and decode the drone’s broadcasts to pinpoint the operator’s location, potentially…