Sachin Deodhar

Sachin Deodhar has been working as a Computer Security Specialist and a Cyber Conflict Researcher with the Private Sector (and assisted Government, Defense and the Intelligence Community in a Consulting capacity) in India, Middle East, the UK and the United States, during his decade long professional career.
His areas of interests are Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), Offensive Information Operations and Asymmetric Cyberwarfare. He has also been involved with specialized research projects related to subversive (cyber and electronic) attacks against UAV platforms and other airborne systems that rely on wireless communication with ground and space based systems for their operation and mission execution.

Cyber-attacks Against UAV Platforms: A Viable Threat or Media-induced Hysteria?
The central focus of this talk is to present and analyze two types of attacks against UAV platforms and to support this analysis with recent examples from real world.  The analysis of the attacks will be preceded by a high level discussion involving typical UAV platform configurations and typical UAV mission types.
The motive behind analyzing these attacks is two fold:
•         To show how, while, similar to traditional cyber attacks (that target data, computer systems and networks), are also fundamentally different, in the sense that they are a hybrid form of attack combining cyber and electronic warfare methods and techniques. This is a direct consequence of the nature of the target (the UAV platform) and the closed and proprietary nature of its underlying architecture, hardware and software components, and communication protocols.
•         As a result of the above, such attacks are usually resource intensive to plan and execute, and require high level of cross-disciplinary expertise.  This talk is also an attempt to show that (and how) in reality, attacks targeting UAVs performed successfully in controlled laboratory environments frequently do not translate into successful attacks under real world conditions

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