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Comment on Iranian Hackers Post Images Over JFK Airport From UAV That Was Hijacked In Marchparent

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Sure! Man I love when people on hn ask genuine questions rather than trying to one up one another. It's one of the reasons I was so reluctant to stop lurking for so long.

Much like the Mars rovers, the navigation system is loaded in a modular fashion, with complex algorithms for each scenario loaded on the fly. So for example, imagine a UAV goes into a stall. Likely the aircraft needs a whole new set of algorithms to recover. It's very likely I this case you'd need low latency disk reads. Now again, this is just a guess based upon my experience with similar systems. I've never developed a UAV system.

Man I love when people on hn ask genuine questions rather than trying to one up one another. It's one of the reasons I was so reluctant to stop lurking for so long.

Well then, you're exactly the kind of person we need to stop lurking and start participating, so welcome aboard. But yeah, I totally understand you.

this is just a guess based upon my experience with similar systems

You mean planetary rovers? If not, can you be more specific? I realize it's not necessarily wise to divulge too much industrial information. I actually have worked on UAVs... not to the point that I can say the scenario you're presenting is incorrect (I wasn't involved in that kind of stuff), but I don't think it's very plausible. I could see that strategy being more reasonable on a super memory-constrained device where the system is radiation hardened, like space equipment. I would think for a normal UAV, you'd just keep all the code (algorithms) you might need in memory.

Its possible I'm wrong. I've never designed a UAV flight system, so I was speculating as to reasons why a lower level of encryption might be needed. Its possible that's not a realistic constraint for atmospheric craft.

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