Friday, April 19, 2013

Aircraft Tracking with the USRP

Been a while since I posted. Just swamped with loads of stuff to do and maintaining my unix beard :-)

Anyway, I had promised to post about the above topic a while back. Here is brief background. Recently security researcher Hugo Teso gave a presentation on how to "hijack planes" using a mobile phone. Well there was all manner of hue and cry from people alleging how misguided the research was and how impractical it is to actually achieve the hack.

What I know is you can track planes using reprogrammable hardware using the Realtek RTL2832U USB TV tuner which is super cheap or the expensive USRP ( yes i would know it is expensive).

The key however is to have a good antennae and appropriate height to receive stray ADS-B Mode S signals from the plane. Pipe the output of the script to a KML file (for Google Earth display) and viola!

You can track a plane as it lands or takes off, complete with the coordinates, speed etc. Ofcourse there are free services that receive this signals and pass them to an application either on a website or a phone but that's the fun in that?

Here is a snippet of my capture.





-ty

No comments:

Post a Comment