Comment by eigenvalue

Seems like it's basically impossible to ever prevent this kind of black box strategy. It's similar to the problem of secure DRM on videos-- at some point you need to decode the stuff to play it on the screen, and you can intercept it at that point. They need to send the commands to the drone in a timely way for it to work, and you can control those commands and know what commands you're sending. Although I guess they could XOR that command stream with some kind of one-time pad or something so you can never mimic it going forward, so maybe not? But whatever the stream of bits getting XORed to the command stream, that would need to exist in the memory in the drone unit, so with enough persistence and skill maybe you could crack it for a particular drone at least. I guess all they need to do is make it uneconomically hard to do for an arbitrary individual drone unit.