How to Stop the Drone Invasion
Drones are on the attack!
Well, not really, but like that Mariah Carey song, it seems like they are everywhere nowadays.
While drones have been around for decades, military conflicts have vastly accelerated the capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles/systems (UAV/UAS, the preferred term for drones) for spying and warfare.
But they have an Achilles heel: they need connection. Without it you get this.
UAS are fed communications and position information via RF links. The science of severing these links is known as Electronic Warfare (EW). At its basic level, EW seeks to deny RF links via jamming (denying the signal), or, more commonly nowadays, spoofing (creating a fake signal to fool the receiver).
An early example of spoofing was documented back in 2011 when Iranian operators fooled an American UAS into thinking it was still in friendly airspace when it was actually in hostile territory.
Spoofing used to be rare as it took sophisticated hardware. No more. Advancements in EW and software-defined radios has made "spoofing the new jamming."
And the collateral damage from all this EW is the alarming rise in spoofing of commercial flights that extend well beyond the occasional drone sighting.
But there is a solution: optical quantum links that remove reliance on vulnerable RF signals (see below).

Last Week's Theme: A Modern Horror Story - Part IV

• Happy Holidays from the Xairos team!

• External projects:
  • Preparing for the next Quarterly Review and quantum time transfer demonstration in January for Project Apollo.
  • Completed the Preliminary Design Review and site survey at one of the optical ground stations for Project Aristocles. Next step is a Detailed Design Review in February.
  • Completed a Preliminary Design Review and preparing for a Project Review in January for Project Chronos.
  • Delivered the first set of mobilizers that will be used for transportable optical ground stations for Project Hermes.
• Internal projects:
  • The University of Colorado student Quantum Forge team is progressing well on their development of a Bell State test and time tagger design.
  • Finalizing the design and bill of materials for a portable free-space quantum time transfer demonstration kit for customer and conference demonstrations.
• Proud to announce our esteemed Board of Advisors! These four leaders in space, timing, photonics, and defense provide valuable guidance as we seek to commercialize our quantum technology for a more resilient and accurate global timing service!
• Attended conferences that give us a chance to meet customers and learn from the industry, including IQT Quantum+AI, the International Timing and Sync Forum (ITSF) 2024, the UK National Quantum Technologies Showcase, the UK PNT Leadership Seminar, the Colorado - Denmark Quantum Delegation Roundtable, and the DOD Commercial Satcom Workshop.
• Been a busy year with seven active projects, conferences, proposals, and technology and IP development. The team is taking a well-deserved break as we plan for a busy 2025.

• The $2.7B National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act was introduced in the US Senate with bi-partisan support. 
• The latest casualties of the increase in solar storms is three small satellites that de-orbited sooner than planned. The cause: "heightened solar activity causes the density of Earth's upper atmosphere to increase," fueling concern for other satellites and communications. 
• Even railways are looking to improve their position accuracy to meet Safety Integrity Levels. 
• The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released their Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) for post-quantum cryptography (PQC). These three software-based encryption key delivery standards are meant to replace existing public key infrastructure that can one day be cracked by quantum computers, known as Q-Day. 
• Even as Starlink launched new satellites to provide direct-to-phone service, China and Europe are moving ahead with their own competing constellations. 
• When the New Year's ball drops at midnight you can ring in the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ).

• Consumer Electronics Show, January 5 - 7, Las Vegas, NV
• GeoBuiz Summit, January 13 - 15, Denver, CO
• Photonics West, January 25 - 30, San Francisco, CA
• ITTM/PTI, January 27 - 28, Long Beach, CA
• Ground System Architecture Workshop (GSAW), February 24 - 28, El Segundo, CA
• Satellite 2025, March 10 - 14, Washington DC
• Space Symposium, April 7 - 10, Colorado Springs, CO
• Nemertes [NEXT], April 7 - 10, Nashville, TN
• Workshop on Synchronization and Timing Systems (WSTS), May 12 - 15, 2025, Savannah, GA
• European Navigation Conference, May 21 - 23, 2025, Wroclaw, Poland

The rise of anti-UAS EW has greatly advanced the art of jamming and spoofing RF signals, which has in turn seeped into our modern world. They may seem the same, but jamming is analogous to “yelling really loud” while spoofing is more akin to “mimicking somebody else’s voice."
Jamming is pretty easy - all you need is a more powerful RF transmitter - but it is also easy to detect.
Spoofing, on the other hand, is much more difficult to detect and therefore, more dangerous.
But there is a solution: avoiding the broad reach of RF signals altogether by using lasers.
Laser/optical links are highly directional, difficult to detect, and can carry a lot of information. As such, they are resistant to jamming.
Add entangled photons to that same link to provide provable security that is unspoofable and nearly impossible to detect.
The other option: rely on AI to run the drone. But we have seen that movie before.