Drones equipped with cameras are getting cheaper and cheaper by the day. As drone ownership increases, so do the risks of unauthorized surveillance. Now, inventors of anti-drone technologies are creating methods to protect us from surveillance drones.  Recently, a group of Israeli researchers at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva created a new method that can help people detect nearby “peeping” drones.

The technology is extremely accurate. If a drone is spying on you or any high-security facility, this new technology can detect not only the drone, but what the drone is looking at.  The technology is a really simple system that intercepts a drones’ radio signals. It does this by creating a pattern so that it can detect what the drone is sending back to the operator. Basically, this means that the system can see what data that is being gathered by the drone via its radio signals.

Intercepting the transmission is not only a great way of seeing what information has been recorded, it can also help you determine the extent of the breach.  Ben Nassi, one of the researchers at Ben Gurion wrote a paper on this technique with a team that included Adi Shamir, a renowned cryptographer and co-inventor of the RSA encryption algorithm.

This sounds like a counter-surveillance strategy that could be seen in a spy movie. But alas, this is now the world we live in.  The new technology makes use of delta frames, which is an efficient video streaming technique that compresses video making it more compact and easier to intercept. This same technique was used by a group of researchers at Cornell Tech, West Point, and Tel Aviv University to prove that their method was successful. The demonstrated using Netflix. Even though Netflix uses HTTPS encryption when tramsmitting video, they could still capture data that showed what the user was watching.

It’s the same type of technique that’s used to intercept the video being transmitted by drones during a spy mission. Even though it might seem that this invention is a bit extreme just to catch a spy drone, it’s important to realize that as drones get more and more sophisticated, we may need to rely on more advanced techniques to spot them.  If the drone is out of range of your binocular, this method will do a great job at detecting the presence of the drone, and also help you pinpoint exactly where the drone and camera is pointed at.

Tests were done with a range of 150 feet, but Nassi believes that with a higher range antenna, they can achieve more. The difference between this detection method and others is that it can detect what a spy drone is looking at, while others can’t.  It may not be very useful for the average person who has nothing to hide, but for high-security facilities that want to protect information, this might be a great way to safeguard their privacy and keep data safe.

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