The unhackable drone.

Is there anything to prevent somebody from programming a drone to accept voice commands, with voice print authentication, and then disable its radio interface.

In SR3 you could do this if you included a robotic pilot, but the description of SR4 drones implies that level of intelligence is standard.

If this was done the advantage would be that a hacker could not affect your drone in any way.

On the down side it takes longer to give the drone complex orders, the range of orders is the range of your voice (or you could tape a radio connected mike to the drone but that could easily be blocked) it is much harder to lend the drone to somebody else’s control, if something damages your voice (illness usually to slow to be a problem but inhaled poisons and hot air) and anybody with a voice mask could listen to your voice for 10 seconds and take command of your drone with even greater ease (but that is uncommon cyber wear)

In spite of all this sometimes it could be worth doing

So do you think its possible.
Under the RAW
With logic
Would be balanced to play


Edward

I like the idea, and i think it can be playable. You would have to code the program yourself (with software+logic i think) and disable the wireless abilities of the drone, which if you can do it to cyber and comlinks... then you can do it to a drone. With would also be helpful for a group that isn't computer savvy. I figure a voice command drone would be a hot item for a team with no hacker/rigger. Of course you would also have to take in mind that any drone that is too noisy (something that flies mostly) would have major problems.

The soft wear wouldn’t be hard to write. Its really just a shell to incorporate 3 existing common programs. Voice recognition (has been referenced as reliable many times in SR) a biometric scanner (voice print) and the drones command interpretation system.

You would need to know what your doing but it wouldn’t take very long.

Edward

Wouldn't it be easier to just give the drone its orders and then tell it to shut down its wireless for a certain period of time? For example, "for the next two hours, remain here, just inside the sewer entrance, and shoot anyone you detect. Then leave the sewers and return to base. Shut down wireless and execute command."

That's great as long as absolutely nothing goes wrong or not according to plan. How often does that happen?

what mdynna said

As a standard rule, I put at least one un-planned for situation/encounter into every run. The world is too complex to plan for everything. It keeps the players on their toes and I get so see how they handle the unexpected. Novice runners will start shooting the instant something goes wrong (the guard has to take a leak and shows up where he's not supposed to), while veterans usually adapt the plan on-the-fly but basically try to stick to it.

Honestly, I wouldn't rely solely on a drone's automated navigation software for this reason.

if the voice is going through the comlink then I would think it could be intercepted and doped, now if you encrypt it someway like stored battle plans (plan Alpha) exec.. and did it via cable with wifi turned off or the way I thought up which is an encrypted picture rotating the encryption every min or so (email the pic to a email or personal web page the drone looks every min or so and updates) I could even incorporate the encryption into an add pic so not to look to obvious (new twist to popups)

If you really want it to be unhackable, make it so that it'll only accept keyboard access, and you have to put your hand on a biometric reader to access that keyboard. Of course, getting close enough to touch the reader might get a mite sticky...

You could set up the drone to go online every X minutes and check for an info dump or instruction set. Maybe have it randomized when it goes online, to make it harder for enemy hackers to latch onto it.

Hell, have the connection be a wireless transmitter that's got an entirely hardware timer on it's power connection. Ain't nothing gonna jam that connection open and let some hacker futz with the drone.

Timer runs past, drone hops online, dials an address on a secure server, checks to see if you've dumped it new instructions, then shuts down and acts accordingly.

Not quite as flexible as having full control of the thing, but for a "sentry gun" situation, you ought to be okay as long as you don't find yourself suddenly having to cross it's line of fire. Maybe add IFF, or have some sort of flashy strobe pattern that, if it sees it on it's sensors, kicks it out of autistic mode?

You could force all communications to require a passkey type authentication to make it all but impossible w/o the passkey or a copy. Even a compromised or spoofed Access ID would require the passkey to allow a login to issue commands.

Remove wireless capacity and install an autoretracting cord.
Kind of limits range though.

About shutting down outgoing wireless link, and then every several minutes powering it back up and looking at some site for instructions.
Where this wold be ok for surveyance Drones, it might be a bad idea for anything with a weapon.

Command "Shoot anyone who trespasses that has a weapon."
Steel Lynx with LMG "Stop! Drop your weapon! You have 1 minute to comply"
Street Sam quickly drops weapons.
Lynx with scanner identifies implants as weapons.
Lynx " You now have 30 seconds to comply."
Sam to Rigger, "So how long until this thing gets new orders?"
Rigger," Umm, about 2 minutes."

So no one here is familiar with the voice modulation cyberware then, huh?

well the thing is that most people don't have that kind of of cyber or adept power. Like the topic line says,"Not without its penalties". I do, however have a adept player with the voice power. Could make for comedic havoc.

Just had an idea. Tie a Kanmushi to the drone you want to use (won't work with the smaller ones but Doberman and such should be fine.)
Hard wire a connection between the two and structuer orders so that if the Kanmushi and the Doberman don't get the same command, the order gets ignored. would work for a while and the Kan wouldn't leave the drone or bother responding back to the Comm if it was out of transmit range, it's just there to error check commands to it's Big Brother.
could also work as an extra set of sensor's for the biger drone.