Originally Posted by
airpolice
People are sold wireless routers and BT home Hub devices with talk of Encryption and it seems to work, for the sales people anyway.
Think about this for a second, the password is requested, or offered, (blind) and then accepted, so any handshake, needs to be in the clear and therefore can be monitored.
Uh, there are well-known and well-documented means of securely setting up an encrypted connection with a remote system when both sides have a shared secret (in that case the password); the simplest and most obvious is to just encrypt the messages with the password and if it's not the correct password then the other system will receive gibberish and ignore it. If the UAVs have an encrypted connection using any well-designed modern algorithm then there's no way for an attacker to take control of them; the downside is that if you somehow get the wrong key on one side then there's no way for you to regain control, but that's unlikely unless something damages the computer on the UAV.
The reason companies are reluctant to trust wireless networking is because there have been numerous attacks on early wireless algorithms which weren't designed properly, allowing either insertion of data or recovery of the key. It also allows people to attack the network from outside the building, whereas a wired network requires physical access.