Look, we know you're all hacking DJI drones. How 'bout a bug bounty? Bending to public pressure as more and more drone hackers break into their kit, Chinese firm DJI has now announced a bug bounty program. "Security researchers, academic scholars and independent experts often provide a valuable service by analysing the code in DJI's apps and other software products and bringing concerns to …
It's the "up to" part of the reward offer that will make sure those who have discovered the bugs for their own personal gain through selling patches, won't be telling DJI how those patches do their thing.
If they sell the derestriction patch for say $200 then they only need to get 150 customers and they've matched the maximum $30k bounty offer, after that they're laughing.
Problem I've encountered is software unable to distinguish between altitude and height-above-ground.
If I want to fly a DJI up the side of a mountain (which I do when filming volcanoes!) I will fly up the slope in a kind of terrain-following style, never exceeding a height above ground of - say - 50m - but the bletcherous ghastly firmware is too stupid to realise I'm not flying straight up in the air and imposes an altitude cap of 500m above takeoff altitude irrespective of the fact the bloody thing is STILL only 50m above the ground! It's no wonder people have to hack them!
The problem you have there is you'd need a hardware patch for it to measure it's above ground height, i.e. a LASER or RADAR altimeter*. Or a lot of extra memory to get a decent digital terrain elevation model into its brains, and I'm not sure where they'd be able to source one that accurate from at a sensible cost.
*I seem to recall they don't have one but land by getting near where they took off from and then descending slowly enough they won't get damaged.
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