Amir Mizroch: 0:20

Hey everyone. This is Amir. Welcome to The Dejargonizer. Mysterious drones have been spotted over the UK and the US. These incidents made headlines but they're just the tip of a much larger iceberg that military and defense experts have been watching with growing concern. That is the rise of drone warfare in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the story's the same. The asymmetry is staggering. A$500 drone can take out a$5 million tank by dropping a grenade on it. There seems to be nothing drones can't do. They're deadly and incredibly difficult to detect. They're changing the way wars are fought much like gunpowder and guns did when they were first introduced in the battlefields of China over a thousand years ago. Now China dominates with drones. But almost anyone can make or buy cheap drones, fly them almost anywhere. And use them for almost anything. The threat they pose is growing. From the battlefields of the Middle East to Ukraine, to the skies of a New Jersey drones seem to be popping up everywhere. The main challenge is how do you detect something that's designed to evade detection? That's what we'll dive into in this episode with Yiftach Richter He's the co-founder of R2 wireless. And Israeli startup that's found a pretty ingenious way of detecting any wireless admitting device. Any device that sends out a signal, including drones.

Yiftach Richter: 2:03

My name is Iftach Richter, I am the founder of R2Wireless. We provide the ability to detect classify and geolocate any kinds of emitting device. Today it's a drone, tomorrow it can be a robot on the ground, and later on it can be a new satellite that just appeared.

Amir Mizroch: 2:21

What do you mean by an emitting device?

Yiftach Richter: 2:24

So emitting devices send information somewhere. Wi Fi device, Bluetooth Satellite communication, tactical radio, and many more. A drone Is only one example. your smartphone, it's always transferring data somewhere. So once you transmit, we can catch you. Can't be invisible if you're transmitting,

Amir Mizroch: 2:46

Can you describe emission? Is it a sound? Is it just a frequency? Is it invisible?

Yiftach Richter: 2:56

Emission is electromagnetic wave. That's the radiation that comes through your cell phone to your other wireless device. Radiation is the way that electromagnetic wave propagates in the space. So electromagnetic wave has a power, and the power is decreasing as it propagates further. The longer you travel, the power is decreasing. Like the sound wave, if I'm shouting from my place, after 100 meter, nobody will hear what I'm saying.

Amir Mizroch: 3:35

Okay. Let's just rewind for a second. Can you take us into how drones actually work?

Yiftach Richter: 3:43

so, a basic drone works between a remote controller and itself. The remote controller sends information. It's called telemetry. Go right, turn left up, down, et cetera. While the drone itself send the video back to the remote controller, easy to use and very affordable. With that, it can be tracked. It can be tracked because there is some serial number of the drone. There is the GPS data it send all the time. Once you turn it on in an area next to an airport or some prohibited area, it blocks you from flying.

Amir Mizroch: 4:25

I have a drone that I fly with my son, and we managed to fly it a few times, but at one point, It thought it was at Beirut airport and we're here in in central Israel and we lost control of it and it flew into a tree in a building. We almost lost it. And since then, we haven't flown the drone and no one in Israel is flying their drones. Um, can you just explain just briefly what's happening there? Like, how does that work? Why is that happening?

Yiftach Richter: 4:54

Two main methods by Israel and, other, militaries is GPS. jamming and GPS spoofing. jamming GPS, it's quite, uh, easy. Means to block, it's to transmit some noisy signal very loudly on a specific frequency. Or various frequency, whatever you wish, and then you can make it harder for the enemy, to operate it in this area specifically.

Amir Mizroch: 5:54

Okay. What about GPS spoofing? How did our drone think it was in Beirut?

Yiftach Richter: 6:01

What is GPS spoofing. It mean I spoof, I send some false information. There are satellite in the sky. need to receive at least three satellite to get your position. Someone sends around you a false information about where you are. That's why you're in Israel and you think you're in Beirut airport. That's what happened.

Amir Mizroch: 6:22

You've done work with NATO, with the Israel Defense Forces, with the German Bundeswehr, what can you tell us about why drones are so hard to detect with this technology? The current detection, tools.

Yiftach Richter: 6:35

the current method to detecting or mitigating drone, they're quite legacy. And they are not relevant to the existing threats. They are based on technology that was relevant a decade ago, camera, radar and passive RF. That's the dominant tools today.

Amir Mizroch: 6:55

passive RF means passive radio frequency?

Yiftach Richter: 6:58

Yeah, RF is radio frequency. Traditional passive RF is built on protocol deciphering. I need to know the protocol in advance. I need to understand where the packet of the important information, like the GPS data, the serial number

Amir Mizroch: 7:13

what's a protocol

Yiftach Richter: 7:14

what is wireless protocol?

Amir Mizroch: 7:16

Yeah. A protocol.

Yiftach Richter: 7:17

Wi Fi, for example. A Wi Fi is a family of protocol. 802. 11, and then you have version A, B, C, Each one is defined by some standard that says, first you have Data like where it comes from, where it needs to arrive to, and how much information you have in the message. You can decode what I'm telling you right now because you know the protocol. This is English, we are speaking between ourselves. So you can decipher what I'm saying.

Amir Mizroch: 7:51

We, from our own experience here, we get a lot of drones that fly undetected, hit buildings, army bases, NATO, Israel, the Germans, everyone are trying to detect drones through radar, cameras. But you're saying, the signals drones are sending can be jammed and spoofed If we look now at what's different about R2 and the way it's going about helping militaries, detect drones, it's not looking at radar, it's not looking at cameras, or acoustics, it's trying to find the emission, whatever a device is emitting.

Yiftach Richter: 8:35

militaries don't understand the basic of wireless. I try to be polite about it. Modern enemies take frequencies and change them into new frequencies that have never been seen before. This makes drones so difficult to detect. It's a hacker war. We are taking a different approach. we are detecting wireless devices. Based on signal processing, and AI, we achieved the ability to detect almost any kind of emitter. we don't care about what exactly was transmitted, but more about if it was transmitted and from where. We don't care about the content of the message we just care about the existence of the message

Amir Mizroch: 9:22

Whether it's, um, on the front line out in the forests and woods of Ukraine, or in an urban area, Gaza, Lebanon, here in Israel, Kiev, wherever it is, there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of devices emitting, right? How do you zoom all that out? How do you filter all that out to kind of know what you're looking for?

Yiftach Richter: 10:00

Imagine that you are going somewhere, a cocktail party many people around, there is lots of noise. background noise. There is interference next to you that the people around you are trying to speak as well. You're going in and you want to talk with someone. There are many people around. That's the other emitting device. There is the background. You want to talk with your counterpart. So you look at him you are talking to him and you're trying to estimate what he's saying under the constraint of very loud background noise

Amir Mizroch: 10:43

It's not just music, right? It's the clink of glasses. It's other people talking, doors opening and closing. There's phones going off. It's a cocktail party, right? There's a lot of. distraction, a lot of noise.

Yiftach Richter: 10:58

And your task is to try to understand what the guy in front of you said and for that, you train yourself over the years, you have AI algorithm in your head to combine the source from your eyes, from your ears to estimate what the lips are saying, and you are trying to estimate the sound that you received. The signal to interference plus noise ratio is very low. So that's the magic of signal processing and estimation theory

Amir Mizroch: 11:29

why do you say that the signal to noise and interference ratio is low? What does that mean? What would it look like if it was high?

Yiftach Richter: 11:37

if it was high, it means that the signal power, the desired signal power is very high, In that way it's not a problem. You can hear very well what he's saying, you don't need to use your eyes to estimate the lips of your counterpart.

Amir Mizroch: 11:51

Okay, let's stay at the cocktail party. Our analogy for the modern battlefield. All the sound, all the clicking glasses, the talking, music, cars outside, people coming in and out through the door, phones going off. I'm speaking to someone or I'm listening to someone and then I just hear some really interesting conversation. words that. Have kind of alerted me and I'm trying to hear what they're saying. How does that work From a drone detection perspective

Yiftach Richter: 12:24

you need to improve the signal to noise plus interfering ratio. Your task is to estimate what he's saying

Amir Mizroch: 12:34

I'm looking at this person. I can't hear everything they're saying. So I'm estimating what they're saying. Is that how it works?

Yiftach Richter: 12:42

Yeah, you are trying to, you heard some noise, you heard a voice, and you are trying to estimate what the hell he tried to tell me. That's actually your task. Try to formulate it mathematically. And what we are trying to do all the time is we are trying to say, based on the electromagnetic wave Is someone transmitted? If so, what was transmitted? Is it something I know, I'm familiar with, or not? I need to listen All the time, in every frequency, everything emitting around you.

Amir Mizroch: 13:19

From a historical perspective we know that the introduction of horses, in battle thousands of years ago, was a game changer fast forward to gunpowder and guns where, you had cavalry on horses charging at the enemy who then had guns and could shoot them from a distance and that ended the cavalry after that, you had tanks, airplanes. submarines, aircraft carriers, big bulky platforms Now we're talking small drones causing major havoc how big a turning point is the introduction of drones into war?

Yiftach Richter: 13:58

It changed the war significantly, today, you don't need to send soldiers to the battlefield. It's a completely changed the battlefield

Amir Mizroch: 14:07

is war going to look like if soldiers don't have to be sent to the battlefield. And I want to challenge you on that because we're seeing a lot of battles around the world, a lot of soldiers in the battlefield. You're seeing soldiers getting attacked by drones.

Yiftach Richter: 14:20

So, myself, I was in the infantry, in my military service, we got used to a way that, we need to fight face to face with the enemy, you know, face to face is literally, uh, sometimes just a few meters. I was wounded just in two meter distance. today you can be just after the front line and send drone few kilometer ahead and make reconnaissance with the drone and then to attack as well. It's becoming, more relevant for every company at the battlefield to use the drone as a fighting tool because it's much more affordable and the technology is more mature. So what was before only for the most sophisticated, soldiers and special units today is for every soldier

Amir Mizroch: 15:10

So do you think we're going to see wars and battles with fewer troops and fewer, um, human casualties or, Is war gonna get even if that's even possible. Uh, even more bloody

Yiftach Richter: 15:25

it'll be much more bloody, unfortunately. You don't have to send your troops, uh, to to kill the enemy. Today in Ukraine, you can see that they are attacking the pilot themselves, like the nerds, they don't try to attack the commando unit specifically, but the pilot of the drone. That's the thing. the main target. In Ukrainian war, one pilot killed 500 soldiers only by drone he killed more than 500 soldiers. He never used his rifle. But his rifle is the drone. He used as many drones as possible to kill and destroy tanks I don't know how many soldiers killed more than 500 soldiers before.

Amir Mizroch: 16:12

Crazy. Okay. let's look into the future. Ukrainians, the Chinese, the Russians are mass producing cheap autonomous drones that through programming and software can fly together, attack together, they can be controlled as groups. Elon Musk. When he tweeted out a video of a couple of thousands of these Chinese drones said, why are we investing in big expensive platforms and warplanes like the F 35, which cost billions. Looking ahead, Yiftach, the way that, you're looking at the next five to 10 years, is the era of, warplanes like the F 35 and F 22s and big battleships and aircraft carriers? Is that, is that over? And are we heading towards mass produced, cheap, autonomous, systems, or do you think there's still a place for the kind of warplanes and big platforms that militaries have been using since, I guess, World War II?

Yiftach Richter: 17:19

You can't change the army in one day or even in multiple years. So they still reliant on big and heavy and centralized system, but this, dependency is decreasing and will significantly decrease over the coming years. There is a change, there is a shift in the world and of course they will continue to buy F35 but instead of having like 10 squadrons maybe they use only five. And instead of that, they will have dozens of unmanned squadrons.

Amir Mizroch: 17:50

I guess we're at the beginning or the end of the beginning of this new kind of inflection point where like previously the introduction of gunpowder changed the battlefield entirely. Now we're at this point where cheap autonomous drones Are changing the battlefield completely. Why is this important? What is going to change apart from the battlefield? Like, why is this? Really a big deal

Yiftach Richter: 18:16

I will try to give you some example. From everyday life that will be soon and we know we all of us We know the delivery drone right that will deliver the package to our home. Just think about it We've never thought about them as an enemy today. If there is a pizza delivery you don't give access to any pizza guy to enter your home, right? You don't know who is, now think about the delivery drone. Amazon wants to send you some package using a drone. And there is some criminal or terrorists that want to take advantage of this ability to enter your home. So they try to spoof them or even send some fake drone that enter your home and make trouble. It can be relevant to everyone.

Amir Mizroch: 19:04

Interesting. So you're saying that and we're seeing this, Amazon Walmart,

Yiftach Richter: 19:09

DHL,

Amir Mizroch: 19:10

UPS, um, are within the next couple of years, drone deliveries, everything from pizzas to just stuff that you order online there's medical deliveries. You're saying that this matters because even those drones can be jammed, spoofed, taken over. is that correct?

Yiftach Richter: 19:32

Yeah, and they can use the drone to harm the innocent civilian at home.

Amir Mizroch: 19:39

Wow, that's scary.

Yiftach Richter: 19:40

And to give you another example, Now imagine that you are in your autonomous car, you're driving someone, your autonomous car needs to receive messages and information from someone, right? And if someone spoofs the GPS of the car, it's cyber. Okay, but it's RF cyber because it's electromagnetic cyber attack.

Amir Mizroch: 20:07

Any last thoughts about these mysterious drones? Months after this has been in the news everywhere and people are talking about it, they're still mysterious and we still don't know. What they are and who they are. I mean, people have theories So do you have any theories about who's sending these drones? Is it the US government? Is it a foreign government?

Yiftach Richter: 20:27

I guess that um, it might be foreign government that try to challenge the detection system of the of the US to test the detection system there are a few countries that have the ambitions to do such things.

Amir Mizroch: 20:43

I love ending on scary stuff. Yiftach, thank you very much. it's been great having you on

Yiftach Richter: 20:50

Thank you.

the-dejargonizer: 20:58

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