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Comment by sbierwagen | Hacker News Reader

Note that Iran captured a RQ-170 drone back in 2011, possibly using GPS spoofing, so obviously using the encrypted military GPS signal isn't a perfect solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

(How did they do it? Who knows. Maybe they jammed the encrypted channel, and spoofed the civilian channel, so when the drone fell back onto the unencrypted channel it was receiving bad navigation information)

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What strange is, if you read the article, an Iranian engineer claimed that it was GPS spoofing, but the US claims it's primary means of navigation is an inertial navigation system (which seems highly believable given up sketchy GPS can sometimes be).

Plus the Iranians have a video of it smoothly landing at an Iranian airbase (which completely discredits the US's assertions that it crashed, and broke up).

IMUs are wildly expensive, and still have quite a lot of drift: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752294

Certainly the RQ-170 has an IMU, and I could believe it might use it as the primary means of navigation, but it's almost certainly corrected by GPS, which gives you a means of altering the drone's path by GPS spoofing.

I thought this was the one where they used that like $35 streaming software or whatever (I'm a finance guy, I know that probably sounds stupid) and were able to take over the controls, hence the landing?

There's also a good chance that drone simply crashed without any help from the Iranians.

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