Counter-UAS (C-UAS) Solutions – When Drones Are Not Welcome

my name is Chris karate I'm have the pleasure of being your moderator this afternoon this is really a truly all-star panel I've moderated a lot of these things over the years and this is a good bunch I just want to say a couple of words about C UAS shared them the other day I kind of liked them CUA s is a really really interesting space when you think about the fact that it didn't even exist a few years ago at least not in the current concerns as far as suas are concerned and it gets lots of attention and I'm often struck by the irony that while DJI and a few other companies have made a few billion dollars the tab to protect against all that will be much much larger before we're done what we have here today the other day we talked about policy and regulation I'm sure we'll get to some regulation what we have here today is a panel with three gentlemen starting here with Ken Dyer who's the CEO of light I and if you admired the odds unit on the floor that was the large ray gun that was tracking your every move he's the proud papa next to him it's got cry no from red six solutions and down on the end is Luke Fox from white fox defense technologies a fellow California boy so what I'd like to do instead of but I'd like to be first is kind of pull the audience and understand who's here how many of you are involved in commercial drone services either as pilots or whatever a handful a small handful how many of you are involved in government agencies of some kind police fire search-and-rescue regulators US Air Force ma'am aim high and how many of you our academics couple any lawyers same ones who am I missing we got other whose other everybody else is going to be other okay that wasn't too helpful but now you know let's let me ask one of the things I really hated these things is when the guy who's never met the other people sits there and reads the BIOS like they're his best friends actually we've you should thank the panel for all putting in the time ahead of time to talk about how we were going to share this out today but let me let them introduce you introduce themselves starting with Ken tell us a little bit about light eye and what you guys do and so letter is a 20 year old company we start out in the head-mounted display thermal cameras ground surveillance radar area providing perimeter security for airports 2012-14 there's 45 of our radar installations on the DMZ in Korea watching for people and vehicles coming across what they started spotting though was they had radar tracks but they had nothing on the camera so well the operators start panning up and lo and behold he's catching drones coming across the border and that was kind of how it all started for our group which consists of five different partner companies that got together and start trying to address this for us in 2015 the Army and Air Force put out a call for industry to show up there was a drone issue going on in Iraq that need to be addressed and that was led to a bit called there's a chance one which was held at it yuma proving the grounds in september of 2015 that started us on a path of doing over 45 events now exercises qualification testing all kinds of other things with every branch of the military imaginable in 2016 desert chance 3 happened in June of that year that's when things were really heating up in Iraq we've got our first contract the day after Labor Day in 2016 28 days later we delivered three systems looks like a scene out of something in the World War 2 movie delivered the three systems trained the field service reps the army signed off the paperwork put them on a truck loaded him on a plane and they went to combat into Iraq they proceeded to go through the battle of holzle and on into the battle of ragga that stuff led to and they're still in Iraq and active today these systems are upgraded updated when we get an opportunity to do that then we got a couple systems the army that became mobile and they were put on ma TV vehicle went into Afghanistan there's two operational is so calm in theater and now we're at the air force having placed they wanted a container guys system so the operator had a place to sit they could do multiple system controllers I've controlled multiple systems from one set up and that led to a twenty four twenty foot sea container we call see us and the airports now got 17 of those and adding more daily basically it seems like so for us it's been a 100 percent military at this point our partners in the UK do do Gatwick they have been out at Gatwick since Christmas Eve that was really actually the first commercial event that we ever had a commercial site that was ever protected by the same equipment that's being done in combat Gatwick is unique they bought the systems they bought couple systems they've had trained 40 different operators at the airport they've also created CONOPS around the whole system basically what happened last Christmas was a lot of chaos so they they've learned a lot over the last 7 months since that time so for light I we are a backbone system we had we try to add in different capabilities if you're out at our booth you'll see we work with net guns we have radars we have cameras we have a W electronic warfare jammer sweets we work with mobile ATK putting a 30 millimeter fragmentation round gun on target we work with Raytheon and the lathe their new phaser microwave weapon that we put on target we work with our of sniffers like white fox who we have a lot of respect for and so for us it's all about adding more and more capabilities to keep up with the challenge this is a chess game it'll keep changing and every time we take away a capability from the enemy they're gonna try to get it back so thank you it's good yeah I good afternoon so red six solutions was founded in 2012 we are red teaming company which means what professional bad guys if you're not familiar with red teaming it's looking at your clients issues through the perspective of a threat threat being a physical threat like a terrorist or an activist but it could be more ambiguous regulations anything that could destabilize your day to day activities it could be a natural weather phenomenon and we work with them to determine how resilient the company is in their ability to handle crisis and in an optimal situation avoid crisis we entered the UAS base in late 2014 and since that time we've played many roles what we've kind of settled into though in the last year or two is threat emulation we provide the commercial aircraft we modify them and fly them and demonstrate the same tactics that threats all over the world are demonstrated what we would call bad actors some of them aren't really threats they're just people doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and to do that well we have to monitor the events that occur globally and so we watch areas all over the world from Eastern Europe to the Middle East South America and Africa we demonstrate the same events that we're collecting information on and then we take those events and we add to the aircraft additional capabilities and we push the technologies even further so we can demonstrate something that's never been done before all for the purpose of developing in the counter UAS systems so we're not prepared for what happened yesterday but prepared for what happens tomorrow if you ask me it's the best job in the world the take drones and modify them and and be a bad guy and we understand it really is for the betterment of the counter drone systems I guess I'll stop there because I don't you tell them where you learned how to do all this stuff so my background is in army aviation I was in tact helicopter pilot 21 years in the military and my mother always told me if if you do bad things are gonna become a bad person then turns out I made a career out of it so everything I see I think about how can a bad guy use it and so when I walk through the exhibition floor I look at these new technologies and I think how can that be retrofitted how can it be used or not its intended purpose but for a different purpose that maybe someone hasn't thought of before and so I think I kind of fell into it between my grand round in the military but also just my natural tendency to do things better thank you and Luke hello I'm Luke Fox the CEO of white fox defense technologies we started out as a to remove the mic towards you just a little yeah so we started out as a drone manufacturer back in 2012 today we are anything but so today we're focused on drone airspace security that ran out of the realisation that the drums that we were making in 2012 and onward were pregnant a lot of the interest was in groups who wanted use them for nefarious purposes including drug smuggling so realizing that it's probably not a good idea to sell drones to people who admittedly want to use drug smuggling it's focused on how can we use the technology that we developed for control systems and universal control systems to be able to safely manage drones so white box today's specializes in the safe integration of drones into the National Airspace System in the US as well as around the world that's primarily through managing authorized and unauthorized roads so on the unauthorized side we partner with companies like light I other great organizations who are deploying technologies around the world we provide the analytics capability for detection identification and mitigation of using RF sensors and effectors to be able to do analysis of drones they're fine and then be able to safely remove them without affecting the authorized drones and then also with that using technology and then with that also secure remote identification technology to be able to identify a friendly dream so you can do iff oh you know which drones are authorized and be able to apply so for those in here you're operating with drones we provide that capability of that's essentially a secure digital license plate most of our technologies play with light is deployed internationally and with a lot of demand domestically and as regulation opens up and greater understanding that will continue to increase domestically and would be able to see more drones being able to use be able to do more things here thank you so we're gonna we kind of put this together with Scots gonna kind of tell the backstory here of how this got to be such a big problem and it not to jump the story but what happened in Iraq Afghanistan the Ukraine had a tremendous impact not just on the DoD but that the impact trickled immediately over to do DHS and DOJ and that was really the way I write the history the the biggest in Congress had ordered remote ID and that in the 2016 extension but when everything came to a screeching halt when they tried to get ops over people in the beginning of 2017 it became clear that remote ID was essential and that the concern was the concern that they'd been seeing overseas so Scott's gonna kind of bring you the backstory and tell you more about being a bad guy he's our bad MacGyver a UAS MacGyver guy and then we're gonna go back to Ken who's gonna tell us more about the backbone and the kinds of technologies that are being used and deployed and then we'll go to Luke who will talk about not just the RFID work they do and maybe some of all these guys will tell you how many drones they're finding everywhere they go but also he's going to talk about securing UTM which is kind of the neck phase of awareness so with that I give it to Scott thank you so the desire to use remotely piloted aircraft for nefarious purposes is not new to examples from the opposite ends of the spectrum I'm Shinrikyo the doomsday cult in Japan if you recall the sarin gas that was used in the Tokyo subway they wanted to use the drones for the purpose of spreading poison over very large groups of people right creating mass hysteria and quite a number of injuries on the opposite end of the spectrum the Irish Republican Army wanted to use drones to actually reduce a collateral damage because there are a number of Irish citizens that were being caught in the crossfire during street engagement between the Brits and the IRA however for both of those groups they didn't really have the expertise and the know-how to employ those systems because it was you wouldn't call it early days and in terms of drone use however they still didn't have the same technologies integrated to make them easy to use and so they never really took off pun intended but over the last 10 to 12 years or so we've seen that influx of components very cheap components and good technologies like GPS systems and multi rotor systems coming onboard which allow even a novice user to kind of fly them right out of the box and as the the price point came down it's actually the prosumer economy that began to bring in the higher level of the technologies prosumer is that person who goes out and gets the latest smartphone or the the newest watch or as soon as you have a child you go get the best camera that you can to video their every move right and so when something new comes onboard you want the very best that you can afford and so people started using drones popular drones such as DJI like the Phantom for aerial photography and videography I didn't take too for you know those bad actors to realize that they could be used on the battlefield as well so in the early days it was all about command control and communication intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance basically Isis flying over the top of forward operating bases prior to attacks determining how the forces they were going to attack were positioned and how they were responding to shots being fired they're coordinating the movement of militants on the ground they realized very shortly after that well if I could fly over top of their position and sit at a nice stable hopper and watch what's going on can I just drop ammunition from there as well and so that's when they developed that a very simple drop harness that released about a two pound explosive munition and then went through kind of a lot of trial and error to keep it from tumbling and hit for the point side down and get a good explosion or learn how to to put fins on board and all of that but it's something that kind of changed the battlefield because it gave a non state-sponsored group kind of their own cheap little Air Force right and put him into a third dimension and gave him eyes in the sky that they didn't have before the trend overseas has kind of moved away from the use of the multirotors into more the fixed-wing they're getting faster they're getting larger - flying longer distances they have better endurance and much larger payloads and what has allowed that is kind of leapfrogging the state-sponsored use fixed-wing which typically have legacy technologies in them because our procurement system if you're familiar with it in the military and ours is no different takes a very long time and by the time the technologies make it to to the user there's no legacy technologies when you're a state-sponsored group you're not getting the latest you're getting the hand-me-downs and the development of better commercial components has actually allowed these bad actors to leapfrog the use of state-sponsored so they're using airframes that are developed by other organizations and actually putting commercial components so it's our internet forums and the use of pixhawk and an archer pilot systems that teach people how to use what prior to that point required a high level of expertise and it's allowing them to figure out how to program the fixed-wing flying long distances and to use point detonating munitions which creates a much larger impact on the battlefield different regions are using different drones for different purposes as Chris mentioned in eastern Ukraine Syria Iraq the Gaza Strip now we're seeing a lot more in Libya and other areas around the world it's primarily paramilitary organizations terrorist organizations and also criminals now I don't want to speak for my counter UAS developers but the very first one that we characterized in counter UAS is the DJI products right and the whole family of products and so what we've seen happen over the last year to two years is a move away from the you know the 72% of the market that's controlled by DJI into the other 28% of the market which is the commercial components being put into custom builds and other less popular aircraft that actually makes them harder to defeat and so we're really on the counter UAS side again speaking for them we're kind of fighting two battles because here in the US we face a completely different problem it's primarily criminal and the careless and the clueless parents and clueless is a term I hear more and more in the military and it's basically people who are doing things putting themselves at risk and putting others at risk for the sake of getting you know that perfect photo perfect video and they want to see the Thunderbirds lying in prior to the the Super Bowl and be right up there underneath them right so they're creating situations where we don't want them there but we also at this time because of authorities can't necessarily mitigate them and send them home what we see in terms of the criminal activity here in the u.s. is on the commercial side they're very interested in the wireless collection of intellectual properties someone flies an aircraft over their headquarters people are leaving cell phones and other devices unsecured and the collection of that information using a Raspberry Pi system or a pineapple system or even the video that is collected of new developments and innovations is collected by third parties and captured for other reasons in terms of professional sports and other they care I can't say that they don't care about people's safety but they care a lot about the licensing right so PGA tournaments tennis tournaments other professional sports venues they don't want people taping and flying over the top of those that are there to either participate or watch those events much due to licensing issues and also the movement of contraband we already know that down on the border there is drones are being used to carry contraband across the border but it's also happening at our state and attend shuri systems items are being flown inside and dropped sometimes it's the aircraft that just drops down to the ground with the contraband on it it's they're also being used as spotters one of the things we learn working down on the border is that the aircraft are used to find where the Border Patrol isn't at a particular time to allow immigrants to cross over into the United States and what's funny about that is they don't want the Border Patrol there but they weren't them close and once they crossed over to the United States they want to direct people actually where to walk to they can claim amnesty and they don't want to have to walk too far when they do that Jim can I stop you can you go back to the football are the large public venues and the stadiums and the rest of those threats yeah absolutely so there there are quite a number of events that fall under NSSE and these are the natural sporting events that are a a very high value to the country like like the Super Bowl and the Indy 500 and those types of things though we haven't had a an event with criminal intent occur like an aircraft that sprays a Clorox or some type of explosive over a large group of people we feel like it's only a matter of time before something like that does occur create came kind of a mass hysteria situation so we don't want really a drones in the area and all other things have happened in other countries like there's a video that I typically show in my standard slide deck which is a Greenpeace flying into a nuclear facility in France this happened just in January or February they used I think it was a hexacopter or an octocopter and dropped a smoke canister it was a nice two-stage release dropped the first one pulled the pin the second one dropped it down onto the stock top of a spent nuclear fuel container facility and they had two aircraft in the area one to actually do the event and one to tape it all while it happened it was a propaganda of them right so no one was going to be injured but what's the difference between an activist and a terrorist it's purely motive and how far you will go to achieve your objectives what they've done by putting that on YouTube is kind of create this great how-to recipe for someone else to come in and do the same type of an event whether it is to a sporting event or to our energy infrastructure right to know that you can fly into an area unopposed bringing explosive or something else that is going to if not at least create quite a bit of havoc and panic as well so sporting event is a good maybe a case study but it's only an example of what could happen in many other similar venues there were two incidents in the Bay Area where they flew over first the Niner stadium then over the Raiders stadium dropping stuff like crazy and the discussion is always well what if they just flew over dropping my talcum powder over 80,000 people it doesn't matter what they what they drop my fall rocks very very heavy scent to it and people are gonna run for the exits they don't know what it is and these are things that are very easy to create in about three hours we took a windshield washing motor and a reservoir and we put it on one of our DJ is 1000 octa copters and put an atomizer around it and we had our own poison release mechanism you know we've demonstrated it to NATO at one of our events and and we'd like to demonstrate that type of thing so people understand that if we could do it in a couple hours anyone can do it and we hope that it doesn't come to that but it certainly is a possibility regarding the counter UAS piece every location that we're talking about it is different in in some way and to defend it requires a different suite of solutions right and so when we test these systems we're often restricted to doing it out in the desert Yuma are trying to lake in locations like that and then what we know about those systems is only what they can do at that particular location where they're tested and so one of the problems that I have as someone who flies for those is we're not often allowed to fly in the areas that we need to fly in to test these systems to ensure that they work that particular environment it's the terrain is the electromagnetic spectrum it's the potential collateral damage of the people who are kind of in that area and so we really push for if you want to put a system in whether it's just to detect and track or to actually mitigate potential that actor in that area we feel like though we need to do the test in that same location we have flown in downtown DC and New Orleans and other areas like that it took weeks to coordinate if not months but it's something that that you have to do to have a good understanding of what those systems can do against the threats that are most likely to be seen in that particular area use up a bit of time stop there and that's a fine place to start let's let's talk about thank you let's talk about Ken that one of the kind of buzz words in the space is a layered approach right and you accomplished that through your backbone and then but kind of tell us what's the layer how do you build a layer the layer is you know first is for our system in the early days late ground surveillance radar that's been retasked and retrained to do air some air defense so we look at the ground with the radar detect up to a thousand targets coming in any given any given time 360 degrees at that point the camera system sloughs to that target and we get it on thermal in daylight so we start to identify it try to defend it depend on the CONOPS that have been established for that area we're located into so um is do nothing all we can do is track it hopefully track it back to the where the pilot is gather the Intel use it for some prosecutions other places like Orion Mosel it was just get it out of the air so we dropped everything that included a different suite of jammers yeah we call it an inhibitor that's seven five different electronic warfare pieces components inside of it now that is migrated into having more capability being more precise messing with something Senate home track it for the Intel you know keep it out of a certain zone put an umbrella over an area as we went through Mosel for instance it was the Iraqi army would not move through Mosel unless they saw our system up because the Intel it was bringing in rocket or mortar shots on to them and causing them huge casualties we dropped thousands of drones in Iraq during this time period just trying to keep everything out and the operation was just jam it all three four three hundred percent isn't go I mean just bring it all down out of here that is now what that is all changed now it's becoming more of we want to be precise the only one don't take out that we don't want to have collateral interference you know a lot of what we saw has now started to migrate what happened down at Gatwick with limited we can talk about right here but you know the drone was flown by somebody who possibly worked for the airport they know exactly where to go to be seen they know exactly how to shut that Airport down the airport had no capabilities the worst part was chaos built on itself so while they could confirm maybe one or two drone sightings in the first day the rest was off hysteria everybody in the airport had the authority to call security and say they saw a drone and that would immediately shut the airport down this fed on itself and they've had to sense create CONOPS to be able to deal with that there's a whole method now where it must be verified anybody can call in but they got to go through a chain that actually verifies is it on a radar isn't on an RF sensing system do we have it on a camera do we have you know verification anyway it's a separate person seen it this is an ongoing development going out the airport is being put into part of their security structure so that they can start having a more adequate response hoping to capture the pilot hoping to prosecute the pilot yeah which is unusual for the commercial area the British government is giving them permission to use our inhibitors used our jammers that is the only commercial site that we know of in the world that we've been able to do that outside of a military base or military maneuver if you're not familiar with it excuse me you know the FCC in this country has tremendous restrictions on jamming taking over that kind of equipment any computer basically and so right now the state of the art is pretty much you can track them and what Luke's going to talk about that but you can't down them and so the real world experience we're getting is elsewhere you know and other levels we start adding in as we had it in the sky wall which you can see out of our order stand out there which is a Nega if you can't use electronic warfare capabilities you can't use the 30 millimeter gun you gotta use something so the net gun has been developed by hope it works we've tested that system that's now starting to be deployed by FBI some DHS some other people Department of Energy the big problem they're running into there is now there's caught those problems you're still bringing the drone down your net it and it drops where they're having to rely on usually somebody that's got training but may not be in a position of being able to make a decision and you're subtly giving them authority to bring a drone down where and when they're happy to be out patrolling they see one you all can of worms on what you're doing there you know I've seen you've seen other challenges with other technology we've been trying a lot of it a lot of it is vaporware there really is a lot of good intentions we haven't seen a lot that allows anybody to use it in a commercial setting the FAA is a challenge we've been through we have an FAA credo we've been working we did a test out at Denver International Airport but we're still working through something I think laughs I was like 32 regulations up there that are having to be changed there's a lot of hurdles to get over before we can actually do something adequate in response and then there's a cost issue right there's 500 plus airports in the country alone plus critical infrastructure let's talk about your piece because you you guys one of your strong suits is detection and that's what's legal here how are people using it and what do you find you when you go out on a job site in terms of activity that nobody knew about yes so every the the typical clients areas somebody says a prison were nuclear power plant were XY facility and we've seen a drone once and so when we deploy at these at these different locations for example along the us-mexico border prisons on the us-mexico quarter we were able to see not just that there was more drones if there was one drone flying about a week but actually there was multiple drones flying every single day and those some same drones were correlated potentially with other drones flying at other prisons and it was this network I was flying so it wasn't just this occasion a drone that happen to be flying there but actually sophisticated network of flying commercial off-the-shelf drones daily deploying a contraband and at these prisons now the interesting thing about the prisons is the impact of the prison is not just that contraband Springs one thing but they saw they saw that as an increase in contraband which relates significantly to increase in violence at the prison which increases the amounts of just the budgetary costs of running a prism so it's very real effect beyond just the the threat of there's a drone flying up in prison all the way to the prisons are spending now millions of dollars more on medical on medical and overtime to be able to cover the amount of violence that's been caused by this contraband this makes a little bit and those are some of those consequences that aren't necessarily always realized when we talk about just the threat of drones when we talk about really the threat of drones it's really talking about the powerful tool that drones are because in every way that drones can offer damage and every way that drones could harm they also offer conversely benefit so just as drones can smuggle in contraband journalists are also being used to smuggle they're not smuggled but to deliver medical supplies and other types of aid after disasters please yeah absolutely is that how's that is that better perfect so one of the things that that I find fascinating but also very sad is when you look at the most one of the most successful if not most successful drone delivery programs in the world it's not the Amazon's that Intel's the ubers the googles those companies who invested tens of millions of dollars in delivery but it's actually the cartels right and now you can look at these very sophisticated that very sophisticated safe drone platforms that are being developed by these major corporations and startups and those are really not saying very much use at all the people who are flying daily hundreds of hours of flight time are those who are using drones they buy off of department stores or off online or shoplift and that's really the incredible and amazing position that we are as a society we have democratized airspace so we think about it for the first time the history of humankind any single person everyone in this room and everyone and practically every room in the United States or really around the world can walk into a department store pick up a box walk out without even buying it to shoplift it right three minutes of parking their car walk in walk out with zero training launch something practically to the edge of space that's incredible the amount of potential dozen that offers is something that right now we as a society barely tapping those who are seeing the most benefits of drones commercially use that loosely our criminal organizations and that's where counter UAS is often seen as anti drone or something that's against drone use but in reality counter drone is what enables the drone industry it's that ability to have accountability and enforcement allows people to not fear drones if you were for example in your hotel and you look out you see your drone as was discussed about drones hovering outside a window right if you're sitting there in your hotel room you see a drone hovering outside your though what's your natural response you feel fear right you're going to be concerned and it doesn't matter if that's you or if you are CBP along the border you feel that fear that helplessness that knowing that you really can't do there's not much that you can do immediately and that is where counter drone and drone airspace security helps that's what it solves it allows you to trust and send Charles framework that has to exist those society and through technology that technological and societal trust framework which have to operate together is the technology allows you to be able to say I know that that drone is supposed to be there I know that it's authorized and I know if it's not authorized that there's a mechanism of enforcement because then as society adopts that feeling of safety then every single one of us who wants to fly drones to see the potential and the value that drones can offer us then we can unlock that is then somebody sees your drone and they say that drone is supposed to be there it's performing an operation and this is it's a theory a theory of mine which I think is continuing to be seeing more and more is that every single one of our customers wants to buy counter UAS wants to buy our technology or the technology of our partners to be able to detect identify and mitigate drones every single one of them have a need to incorporate drones to fly drones even if they don't recognize that today because right now when they think about drones it's fear and they're saying there's drones flying in my critical infrastructure facility that I need to stop they all have the value and there's potential huge potential for drones to be integrated into all those environments and that's where it's key and that's where was some of the called micro UTM what white-box calls micro UTM instead of talking about this big broad UTM UAS traffic management or universe traffic management across the entire country or across the globe let's just talk about it individual facilities this facility right here has sensitive airspace as sense of airspace you need to be able to detect identify mitigate unauthorized drones and you'd be able to verify and track authorized drones and that allows you to be able to truly incorporate drones into the airspace system and whatever size that sensitive air spaces whether single facility or an entire country if you need an example we've talked to people running refineries plants like that and they have their own drones up flying inspections so now how does plant security deal with the fact that there's three drones well I thought they were only flying - what is that and that's the kind of real-world situation that I think you're talking about do we have any people who are responsible for protecting anything in here oh good we'll just get past that let's open it up for some questions do we have questions you have one of the foremost groups of authorities in the world here really okeydoke let's move on what do we think about swarms is there one see illegal its protected it's illegal yeah yeah a federal government I'll jump in here just different okay looks immoral yeah we agree great ahead to a time that we're going to so I'd argue that it's not illegal I would argue that there's a lot of ways to do it illegally so when we and so that's gonna end on the operation that's going to depend on the technology that's being used and the threat so there's a variety of factors that make mitigating a drone moving a drone from their space in many cases in the United States illegal the fact that the purely doing it is not illegal so that's why I want to point that out because there's a lot of ways that you can do it legally depending on the technology potentially use or technology there's the crux of it right now the only people with the authority to bring down a drone in the United States besides the covered military basis is DHS and DOJ it's strictly a federal authority it's been that way for a long time because if you want to understand it understand that drones are classified the same as manned aircraft and they enjoy all the same protections that needs to be changed things that's one of the things you know Scott's talking about there's and in Ken's talking about you got thirty two rules to change it's a massive undertaking yes sir who wants it I'm happy to jump into that there too so when we look at remote ID'd one of the values of road ID is it allows you to be able to filter out the noise so right now our for example our counting us customers they see a drone and they actually assume that it's unauthorized and if they want to authorize a drone to fly an event they come up with very creative mechanisms so for example at a1 national secured a sensitive national security event they attached a baggage tag just a federal agency attached a baggage tag to the bottom of the drum that's that was their former code ID now that worked enough at another large event they had a police officer on a walkie-talkie stating the location of the drone everyplace it was two over hundred law enforcement officers telling them where that one Jerome that's authorized was a lot of flying that's not really scalable so when we look towards that what we won't be able to do is filter out all the authorized drones and securely focus on the unauthorized room yeah part of that is on the authorized drones is also trusted identity so for example you might have a drone oops unauthorized to fly in a certain airspace but has a trusted identity so now it's very different reaction where you're going to respond and now call somebody maybe give them a fine or have give them a notice versus this is a completely unknown drone that's been introduced to this airspace and now it needs to be treated as potentially a terrorist threat that's where iff identify further foe really allows you to be able to differentiate that which Ramon Aidid helped solve in a very practical way mode ids not the end-all be-all you need to have in certain circumstances and sensitive air spaces you might need elevated so remote IDs like a license plate so you can drive a look on the roads with the license plate but if you want to drive potentially into the White House you need more than just a license plate to prove your identity and that's where general remote ID and secure mode ID different and that's where secure money you can help people be able to have expanded operations beyond just what's generally allowed similar to license plate and potentially secondary forms of identification for for operating a sensitive airspace the problem Bob is I see it I want Scott to talk about what the what they need to see and what he what you need to do but the problem is that what they went up and sold on the hill last year was a binary solution if it's quacks it must be a good guy or we know something about him but there's no policy that's gonna say yeah what we're gonna know and if it doesn't squawk it's bad and if we can kill it we will right and that's kind of what got sold for remote ID I look at it and say when there's a hundred thousand or a million drones flying all over America every day now we have become a license plate now it's a DMV problem and now it's a local law enforcement problem to deal with whatever vehicle crash is involved what are your thoughts Scott what do you need to see to make remote ID useful that's a difficult question what you just asked me I would rather impose if I could a remote ID doesn't keep people from doing bad things it really doesn't whether you have it squawking that particular frequency or not it doesn't mean that you're not in the airspace that you shouldn't be it or doing something that you shouldn't be doing we're talking about aircraft that move very quickly right so even an aircraft that doesn't have a remote ID if that's what you are relying on to determine if it's Friend or Foe it's moving well inside your decision cycle right an aircraft that goes at 40 miles per hour which is fast for a multi rotor and a fairly slow for a fixed-wing is covering a mile in less than two minutes well you know a mile is a pretty good distance there are a lot of people launching closer than that by the time you go through that process of determining whether it's Friend or Foe it is reaching its objective and it's accomplishing its mission until our counter UAS systems are actually working autonomously or can create that geofence that bubble that at least keeps them outside of a particular area relying on that type of system is going to be a little bit too slow to our dress at least right now to be effective yeah and the range can of your average typical radar sail is so we protect a bubble it's a zero to three and a half kilometers but what we saw mostly in the end country in theatres was stuff that popped up within 500 meters and that was an immediate reaction it was up we had it on radar and like I said the cut off then was bring it down you're not gonna get that in a commercial setting so it becomes a little bit more of a challenge the other one is is our challenge would be done you just talked about people stealing drones do you have a million Amazon drones flying around look like an Amazon drone absolutely so that's an absolutely green that's where secure remote ID comes to solve that is then you need you might require compliant optimization so because is that a UTM function or is that a remote ID function because the like say you team function it's enabled through yeah because if to understand remote ID understand that at the the arc the remote ID arc that the FA convened a law enforcement officer held up the phone and said it's got to work with this now it's not a bad idea because what a law enforcement officers have all over America that don't require more budget this this is a pretty limited device to do these kinds of things with and right and so now we say well we got remote ID but you've got a special licensed one now does everybody have that app yeah it's actually a really good question something that that I spend a lot of time and work with we work with FA ICAO with the United Nations a number of organizations exactly dressing that that one law-enforcement officer he's he's caused thousands of hours of very very expensive very smart people's time that's helping to solve exactly that problem which is how do you have somebody hold on the phone and be able to identify it and one of the I think to Scott's point one of the when you look at the future remote ID encounter yes well we have to see and the way that I like to describe it especially to when there's a language barrier to our customers is the firewall for the sky so firewall is not about stopping everything is pretty good because if you're a stop everything you lose a lot of value that's something like the Internet provides right the firewall is about stopping the bad while enabling the good to be able to penetrate through the question is to Scott's point and also kid's point sweat levels required of authorization and authentication so such as cryptographic authentication so that you know for absolute certain that that drone is who it says it is that it's doing what it's supposed to be doing and that's the key and that's going to depend on the operation of the drone as well as the airspace that its operating and that's what we're working for example with the FAA very specifically on how do we help define what that looks like what technologies we use based off of those policies can you spoof it yes mate facing three-letter agencies who pin test our systems but general my ID though you can spoof that all day and that's the real that's I think the - Scott's point you can spoof that a general remote ID in fact at DEFCON the world's largest hacker convention we we put on an event where people were spoofing at 24/7 throughout the entire thing because general or about ID is heavily smooth just like a DSP for manned aircraft anybody can say there anyone anywhere at any time so what what's the fix Ken more technology you're gonna have to keep developing things that are going to work in a vast array of settings yeah I feel like and to me personally the more complicated it gets the easier it's gonna be for somebody disruptive for somebody to break into a ID system to be able to do something you know you keep adding levels on to the drone you make it more difficult to fly you make it more difficult for the average guy to pick it up and use it that's gonna disrupt a huge revenue source for a lot of companies DJI so now you're gonna start taking on DGI you starting to battle the industry you know people talk about early days we're gonna tackle you and stuff you are going against the industry spending a fortune trying to hack a certain kind of vehicle to be have that loophole closed quickly and you you you're gonna defeat yourself on every one of those kinds of fronts so you know you're gonna need different levels of systems for different levels of the facilities if you got an airport which is moving 24/7 aircraft coming in and out you've got to keep those Airways open you got to keep those gates moving that's how that airport makes revenue that's how that airline makes revenue when you disrupt that it's gonna be expensive so they'll put in whatever text they'll start eventually they will buy whatever technology protects that are do that return on investment but you get someplace that say what's called a small oil refinery and they can't afford it they're gonna have to pick something else they're gonna find another pathway to something prisons for instance very very sensitive to pricing and I think that's where you're gonna come into something that's actually economical for them to the deploy in use and that's another part of that as well as manpower you've got to have people that are trained to use these systems unless they're fully automated but again you start talking so you're stuck on the automated path and start having resistance from different people that don't want human systems so it's constantly a struggle and that's not going to be resolved for me I don't see you think Scott well I agree with Ken that it's not going to be resolved in the next three or four years for sure I think what really needs to be changed first are the authorities of what and where we can use mitigation systems the problem is that your threat is always going to be ahead of your defence systems that's because people do not want to put money against something that hasn't happened yet so the technology is going to develop and it's going to move into the the improvement of what a drone can do it's going to make them smarter it's going to take that gap that already exists between what a threat can do with their aircraft and how we can counter it it's going to expand that gap right artificial intelligence machine learning all of that stuff because there are so many contributors to the industry of UAS and very few contributors to the industry of counter UAS and so we have to be very cognizant of what could happen in the future and invest in in the future and not in in what has happened yesterday questions this yeah absolutely so the platform's they're very adaptive the groups that are using or giving a higher level of expertise and they understand which UAS components are more resilient to counter UAS systems and others for example the the pixhawk here gps got a nice copper lining on the bottom of it it's got a line in the counting of goers around the side unless that GPS denial system is either elevated where the aircraft shows its wing it's going to be resilient to jamming that system also is resilient to spoofing because if you say that now the it if you tell it that it's at a different location the system is smart enough to say well I'm not there that didn't just happen so I'm gonna use my magnetometer and I'm gonna use my compass and I'm gonna continue right along that path that I had before and I'm gonna get to my target and it might not be within inches anymore but it's gonna be within feet at least and you're still going to get those effects that you were looking for and and so they're taking these really good resilient components and they're putting them into the systems where they need to do long-range flight use larger platforms and carry the bigger payloads I tried not to scare you all too much earlier but you know the houthis on several occasions have done point detonating attacks within a few feet in the hundreds of kilometers Abu Dhabi Airport was attacked from a 1200 kilometer range Wow using a fully autonomous aircraft carrying an explosive onboard pre-program launch forget walk away they've become the most prolific and proficient users of UAS and all the stuff that they're doing is learned from the internet and they're using commercial components this is not stuff handed down by Iran this is stuff that they're doing on their own if you're waiting for something to happen in the US before you respond to that don't because it's not if but when it's going to happen at something you might remember Christopher Rea said that almost two years ago and it Rizzo look it didn't happen it hasn't happened next question anybody yes sir [Music] that's what it always takes and the sad part about that is you look at the whole industry let's say tomorrow and aircraft is brought down on the runway you know life not in takeoff or landing and that gets out on the blog's everywhere that guys now told people how he did it how he was successful that spread you got to turn to us in the industry and say we need to protect every airport in the world tomorrow that ain't happening you thought things shut down for 9/11 was bad imagine if people were afraid to fly because they're worried about so many flying from there and you come back to us and they said hey you want we want to protect 500 airports in the US doesn't happen in six months yeah absolutely sweetheart yes and two kids point there the I think there's a a lot of people think that the county rice industry is waiting for that a bit to happen yeah but in fact what we would much prefer is to see a very much sensible transition towards appreciating the threat that Scott talked about rather than is whiplash reaction as we saw with Gatwick and every time something like that happens there's this whiplash reaction and like what the solution for Gatwick was taking the two kilometer no-fly zone around Airport expanding it to five kilometers right it's that whiplash reaction that's I'll say to the person's face directly it's not very sensible right that's not actually solving anything it's just casting a wider net of people who are potential or now you have to be concerned about that's employed technology and the really interesting thing about Gatwick was I don't know how many of you know it but a year before they'd have to shut down and divert a ton of flights for another drunk things so then a year later this happens and I kind of wondered will so who was in the meeting and what do they they remember yeah they thought it was a one-off so that's our our if you would do an evaluation for this fine group of gentlemen it'd be appreciated thank you very much enjoy the rest of your day and they're here for questions [Applause]

Channel: InterDrone

Views: 641

Keywords: c-uas, CUAS, Counter-UAS, Chris Korody, Christopher Korody, RedSix Solutions, Liteye Systems, Whitefox Defense, Scott Crino, Kenneth Geyer, Luke Fox, national airspace security, FAA, InterDrone, panel

Id: zsl3BwIIJ1Y

Length: 60min 25sec (3625 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019