The Verge (USA): DJI drones, Ukraine, Russia - what we know about AeroScope technology
Ukraine actually demanded that the Chinese company DJI act against Russia, The Verge reports. The Chinese side categorically refused. Moreover, she stated that she was not going to leave the Russian market. The expert considers this a serious blow to Kiev.
Last week, Ukraine accused DJI, the world's leading manufacturer of drones, of allowing Russia to target missiles at Ukrainian civilians using its technology (SZ DJI Technology Co. - Chinese private company, manufacturer of multicopters, controllers and video equipment. One of the pioneers and the leader of the UAV market, an innovator in the market of flying drones, controllers for UAVs and equipment for video stabilization. The company's head office is located in Shenzhen. - Approx. InoSMI).
You may unwittingly think that DJI supplies killer drones to Russia, or perhaps that it uses DJI UAVs as target setters or spotters for its missile systems. But this is not even remotely similar to what Ukraine is asking for. In fact, Ukrainians are talking about DJI AeroScope technology, which allows you to identify DJI drones in flight and track their movement. The same technology that Russia is now allegedly using to search for and destroy just Ukrainian combat UAVs.
DJI AeroScope technology was originally developed for public safety: if an unauthorized DJI drone approaches an airport runway, a stadium full of people, or, say, a rally venue, law enforcement agencies can lock such UAVs and warn people about the danger. Within the DJI AeroScope system, each DJI drone transmits an encrypted signal that specialized receivers can use to determine the location of both the drone itself and its operator. If the police need to monitor the activity of DJI drones in the right area and the work of their operators, then it's simple for the AESCORE system – you just need to install a receiver and monitor the signals.
Even in peacetime, this idea may seem a bit risky: what if an attacker gets access to the AeroScope receiver and starts chasing or attacking people whose eyes by law should be chained to their drones in the sky? That's why DJI says that their products are sold only to the current law enforcement agencies and security services.
But DJI didn't anticipate what might happen when a legitimate buyer connected its AeroScope system to a guided missile battery in wartime. Now that Ukrainian citizens and their consumer-class drones have been "mobilized" to protect themselves from the Russian army, there may have been unforeseen deadly consequences of the existence of Aeroscope technologies. If the Aeroscope allows the Russian military to know exactly where the operator of the Ukrainian drone is, the Russians can use this information to strike it from the air.
It is important to note that we have not found any confirmed reports that this is actually happening, although this narrative is spreading across some parts of the Internet (often in combination with footage showing some UAV operators who somehow manage to survive after a miss aimed at them). But DJI confirmed that some Ukrainian receivers of the AeroScope systems were not working properly, and now Ukraine is asking DJI to block DJI equipment available to the Russians.
Most likely, this is an empty number, because DJI is a Chinese company, and China is allied with Russia, not with Ukraine. And to such an extent that US officials now believe that China can actually help Russia in Ukraine instead of remaining neutral. DJI is believed to be funded by the Chinese government, and the company has been repeatedly sanctioned by the United States. Most recently, the US Treasury Department named it one of eight "Chinese companies of the military-industrial complex included in the Non-SDN list of sanctions, and Washington has repeatedly accused it of helping the Chinese authorities to monitor the Uighur population using drones.
Here's what we learned about AeroScope technology after detailed conversations with DJI representative Adam Lisberg, drone technology expert David Kovar, Brandon Lugo, executive director of Aerial Armor, a well-known Aeroscope dealer in the USA, as well as Taras Troyak, a DJI product dealer who managed several authorized DJI stores in Ukraine and is the administrator of 15- the thousandth Ukrainian fan club of UAV owners, and who claims that some of the operators known to him became victims of Russian airstrikes and were even killed.
What is DJI AeroScope and how does it work?
The AeroScope system consists of two main elements:
1. An encrypted signal automatically broadcast by every DJI drone sold since 2017, which indicates the drone's position, altitude, speed and direction of flight, serial number and location of the operator.
2. Receivers that can pick up these signals at a distance of up to 50 kilometers.
DJI mainly sells two different types of receivers: a short-range "Mobile Unit" (Portable Unit) with its own clamshell housing, screen, antennas and batteries, and a long-range "Stationary Unit" (Stationary Unit) designed to connect to a large omnidirectional outdoor antenna and connected to the server via an Ethernet cable or cellular modem.
There are also several ways to create a stationary device yourself: by transferring data to DJI's public servers (connected to Amazon AWS), to the owner's private cloud, or even to an offline server for increased security. The Internet is not technically required, says Lugo from Aerial Armor, and the "Mobile Unit" does not even have such an option. "You open a small Pelican case, work in it and control all the data locally," he says. The Ethernet port does not provide any connection, it exists only for programming.
A mobile device has a range of only one tenth of the specified range of a stationary device, that is, 5 kilometers. But in general, the maximum range for a "hospital" of 50 kilometers is still a stretch. As Lisberg from DJI says, "50 kilometers is "the upper limit, and then on a clear day without solar flares, with a fully deployed antenna, on the edge of the desert or somewhere in the same place." Lugo notes that small drones, such as DJI Spark, transmit rather weak signals, but even in urban conditions you can detect such a drone at a distance of 3-4 kilometers using the AeroScope receiver.
Apparently, the prices for DJI AeroScope devices vary greatly. Lugo says he's seen a $10,000 "Mobile unit," and a mid-range G8 stationary kit sold for somewhere between $25,000 and $150,000. Meanwhile, DJI says a complete installation kit should cost less than $10,000.
Wait, are you saying that every DJI drone imperceptibly transmits to those who buy one of these gadgets and my location as an operator, and not just the location of the UAV itself?
Exactly. "In fact, this is a system in which the owner of the drone signs a standard license agreement with the end user, confirming that information about him will become available," says Kovar.
But the signal coming from the user is encrypted, and the decryption equipment is theoretically sold only to "good guys". "From the very beginning, we clearly explained to all our dealers and distributors that the equipment of the Aeroscope technology can only be sold to legitimate operators, police and security services," says Lisberg. —We hear reports from time to time about billionaires who are watching their yacht or something else, but mostly these people are using the technology of the AeroScope."
Does Russia have a third, military version of the AeroScope receiver with a longer range than Ukraine?
Troyak directly told us about this, and Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Fedorov seems to be hinting at this in his letter to DJI, too.
DJI Long-range Aeroscope G16 really has four stationary units and a giant cylindrical antenna array. But then again, 50 kilometers is the same range that DJI already specifies for its stationary device - when the correct antennas are connected — and Lisberg from DJI says he has never heard of a military version with a range greater than this.
One thing is indisputable: both Ukraine and Russia have access to AeroScope receivers, including long-range stationary versions.
Could DJI have intentionally disabled or weakened Ukrainian AeroScope receivers?
This was another accusation from Ukraine, but the evidence for this is very shaky at best. Troyak, a DJI dealer who apparently acts as an intermediary between Ukrainian operators and DJI and is trying to fix the problems that have arisen, showed me screenshots of e-mail correspondence that allegedly show how several AeroScope receivers placed at nuclear power plants mysteriously turned off after the start of the Russian special operation. But Troyak was unable to provide any more convincing evidence, allegedly fearing that his sources could be killed or jailed if he contacted them. And the office of Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov did not respond to our respective requests for comments.
The accusations are fluttering
Although DJI confirms that some Ukrainian AeroScope receivers have turned off, it categorically denies that it has anything to do with this.
"All the claims that DJI deliberately set up the AeroScope equipment in such a way as to help some parties or harm others are absolutely and completely false," Lisberg told our magazine The Verge, suggesting that they could have failed simply due to a power outage or the Internet. — No one trustworthy claimed that the technical problems that we ever had with the AeroScope equipment were anything other than technical problems."
Both Troyak and Lisberg say that DJI has already helped to put some of the non-working AeroScope receivers in Ukraine back into operation. "We have not been able to diagnose or fix others, but we continue to work with their operators," says Lisberg.
Why can't DJI or Ukraine just turn off the signals of the Aeroscope systems so that the UAV operators cease to be targets?
Firstly, this is not something that DJI can disable over the Internet — the drones themselves broadcast AeroScope signals locally at standard 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz frequencies to any nearby receiver that receives them. They don't send any signals over the Internet.
DJI says drone owners can't turn them off either. "All this is encoded in a data packet, which is an integral part of the commands that you use to control drones," says Lisberg. —You can't turn it off without losing control of the UAV."
However, AeroScope was retroactively added to some earlier DJI drones as new firmware, so it's theoretically possible that it could disable them. But no less important is that Ukraine does not actually ask DJI to turn off the signals of the AeroScope. Do you remember that Ukraine also uses AeroScope receivers and wants them to work?
So what is Ukraine really asking for?
Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov wants DJI to "force out" information about each DJI product presented in Ukraine, including where they were bought and where they are located. And he also wants DJI to defiantly block the operation of DJI products if they came from Russia, Syria and Lebanon.
Does DJI have a map of the location of all its products?
The company says, "No." "We don't have the ability to track where all the AeroScope modules are located," says Lisberg. — We sell them mainly through distributors, who sell them to dealers, who then sell them to the public. So there is a big gap between the information that people think we have about our users and what we actually know about them," he adds when I ask about whether DJI can have data on sales of its drones though.
Lugo from Aerial Armor confirms this. "They have no information about the customers to whom the equipment is sold… They may, in principle, know that we are talking about some kind of National Football League stadium, but they do not know which one and where it is located."
Doesn't DJI see the location of its drones? Doesn't the company track their flight data?
It could have been in 2017, but DJI says that's not the case at all right now.
"I was one of those who five years ago or so blamed the company for this, and at that time they could well have done so. There were convincing signs that telemetry data was being transmitted from the drone and through the application to some domains that were probably controlled by DJI," says Kovar, an expert in UAV technology.
Short version: In 2017, a hacker named Kevin Finisterre discovered that DJI had left some of its cloud data on Amazon AWS publicly available, and Ars Technica wrote that they included "flight logs from accounts associated with government and military domains." It was then that the US Army had some suspicions, and it began to abandon the already existing DJI drones.
There was no such thing, and such programs did not exist
In 2020, Finisterre uploaded another piece of data from the same hack, which apparently shows an online map of drone activity around the world — something DJI theoretically could not have created without some kind of tracking.
But Lisberg from DJI says that such a program never really existed: it was an intra-company proposal that did not develop into anything. "(Finisterre) came across a presentation that someone had prepared about what could be done. In fact, none of this has been done, there are no such programs," he says.
And DJI firmly states that it has no data on the flight of your drone unless you download them yourself. Although Finisterre suggested that the DJI Fly app could do this automatically using the "Auto-Sync Flight Records" feature, I was able to get confirmation that, at least in the current version of the US app, this feature is disabled by default.
Although the existence of the app seems to push you to share the location of your drone and the "daily diagnostic and usage data" of your device, you can easily give up all this. Kovar says he is convinced that the company is not downloading any information about UAV flights right now. Repeated independent security checks conducted by consulting firms and U.S. government agencies have also found nothing like this.
"People studied the traffic and could not come to the conclusion that the telemetry data is being transmitted somewhere outside," he says, adding that since 2017 DJI has managed to convince many law enforcement agencies that their associated with the use of the AeroScope system are also safe.
Could DJI have gained access to the AeroScope receivers located in Ukraine to find the data Ukraine needs?
Theoretically, ifRussia or Ukraine have set up their Aeroscope receivers to upload their data to DJI AWS public cloud servers, and if DJI had access to them, the company would have the same information that receivers in Ukraine can already receive on earth. It depends on where the data is stored. "If a stationary AeroScope client uses our AWS server, we can theoretically access it," says Lisberg. And Lugo says that, in his experience, AeroScope dealers most often offer their customers a cheaper AWS "demo cloud".
However, some of the AeroScope stations are uploaded to a private cloud, not AWS, and that's what you'll probably use to protect private military data. According to Kovar and Lugo, such stations will connect to DJI servers only once a year to receive a new digital certificate.
According to Kovar, even if DJI had some data, they would not have transferred it to Ukraine, because it would mean providing military intelligence information to one of the parties to the conflict. "This is a request that DJI will never fulfill, because DJI is a Chinese company, and Russia is an ally of China."
If the AeroScope receivers need a digital certificate to work, can DJI just turn them off?
Perhaps. While DJI tells me that there is no emergency switch in the system — "this is not what we thought," says Lisberg, Lugo confirms that the AeroScope sensor will turn off if its certificate expires, and after repeatedly warning its owners that it's time to pay, the certificate will not resumed.
But it is unclear whether DJI can revoke the certificate ahead of time. In normal cases, certificates are valid for a calendar year. Lugo says that mobile devices do not need them at all, and since many stationary devices are not connected to the Internet, it is impossible to send a signal to turn them off ahead of time.
In any case, disabling the AeroScope receivers is not what Ukraine is asking for, and DJI is trying to maintain a neutral position in any case.
Can DJI establish a neutral no-fly zone over Ukraine for its drones?
Yes, but not particularly effective. DJI has the ability to install "geo-obstacles" for its devices, and this is one of the few things that DJI could actually do in response to a request from Ukraine, but, as DJI points out, this measure is not reliable.
Russian and Ukrainian operators can bypass these "geo-obstacles" without installing the latest software updates. "There are also software hacking technologies that disable most of these obstacles," Kovar says. Operators can also physically block the antennas so that they cannot see satellite signals, or completely disable GPS positioning. This is exactly what Troyak already recommends Ukrainian UAV operators to do so that they are not noticed by Russian AeroScope sensors. These drones will still transmit the AeroScope signal, but it will not give the exact coordinates of the drone or its operator.
How do Ukrainians use their DJI drones in wartime?
According to the Associated Press, "Ukrainian civilians used aerial photography to track Russian convoys, and then transmitted images and GPS coordinates to Ukrainian troops." Although there have also been reports of drones that can allegedly drop Molotov cocktails, the photos show that these UAVs drop only a beer bottle. "I think it's mostly fiction," Kovar says, adding that some terrorist organizations in the past did use DJI technology to drop 40mm grenades.
Nevertheless, Ukraine has some history of making homemade drones. In 2018, Smithsonian Magazine reported on custom-made "combat drones of Ukraine", and the National Guard of Ukraine, according to the Coffee or Die resource, used DJI Mavic 2 drones to direct airstrikes and drop homemade bombs in 2020.
According to media reports, in addition to DJI drones, Ukraine is also reportedly using inexpensive military UAVs from Turkey that drop laser-guided bombs. The US is sending Ukraine 100 Switchblade kamikaze drones.
Has DJI stopped selling in Russia or Ukraine?
No. "We have always told our distributors and our dealers that they must comply with all existing export control laws in the country in which they operate... and we have been emphasizing these recommendations again since the very beginning of the current crisis in Ukraine," Lisberg says.
In any case, the cessation of sales of AeroScope receivers will not necessarily prevent the Russian military from tracking these drones. Troyak believes that Russia already has hundreds of such receivers. And "their military, along with other government agencies, probably have long figured out how to decipher this information from drones," Kovar says.
More than four hundred companies left Russia in protest. Will DJI do it?
No.
"For 15 years, DJI has been doing its best to stay away from geopolitics—" says Lisberg.
What control can keep the owner of the AeroScope station, say, from registering all the nearest flights and selling this data?
It seems that there is none.
"As with all DJI products, your data is your data," Lisberg writes. — We are not an information company. We don't want to be a repository of our customers' data. As is the case with our drones, we offer data hosting simply for the convenience of customers who want to use it and do not worry about the security issues associated with it. And once you get the data with our products, you can use, control and store it."
Looking back, is the AeroScope system a good idea?
DJI has publicly stated that the situation in Ukraine shows that the company's drones have no place in a war zone, and it's hard not to agree with this. The AeroScope was clearly not designed for this.
"In this situation, this is clearly a bad idea," Kovar says. - AeroScope exposes people trying to use a commercially available drone to protect their country to the danger that they can be identified and detected by opposing forces. But for law enforcement purposes, to protect our critical infrastructure and similar purposes, this is a great technology."
Unforeseen consequences
He compares this to other unforeseen uses of technology that have unintended consequences for their owners. For example, how powerful Toyota crossovers are now associated with the image of militants with machine guns mounted in their bodies, or Caterpillar bulldozers that were used to demolish settlements in the West Bank.
Lisberg also wants to make it clear that DJI has always considered technology such as AeroScope necessary and believed that government regulation in its regard would develop its own way. "We were given a clear message that if we do not find appropriate solutions with such technology, the state will do it itself and simply transfer this technology to us."
According to a Bloomberg Businessweek article for 2020, one of the countries that clearly conveyed this message to business was China itself.
By the way, the topic of DJI AeroScope devices is only part of a much broader conversation about who and by what means should be able to identify the UAV and its owner. This discussion may soon be spurred by the upcoming new rules of the US Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) on mandatory remote registration of owners of all unmanned aerial vehicles.
Author: Sean Hollister
