# BlueMark

- **Event:** [National Security Hackathon (by Army xTech)](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/3rd-annual-natsec-hackathon)
- **When:** May 2 at 9:00 AM – May 3 at 4:00 PM (PDT)
- **Where:** Shack15, San Francisco, CA
- **Team:** [Birger Steen](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/Birger), [Sebastian Steen](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/Seban), [Arpit Mathur](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/arpitmathur), [Nicholas Fleischhauer](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/unogi)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/sebaleks/fpv-friendly-id-demo
- **Demo video:** https://youtu.be/yVcUMnm2TkI
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/3rd-annual-natsec-hackathon/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/3rd-annual-natsec-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/67

BACKGROUND
- Modern war is a drone war:
Ukraine fields ~7M cheap FPV drones in 2026 — now the #1 cause of battlefield casualties, ahead of artillery.
- The US is unprepared:
No mass-produced $400 drone, no doctrine for swarm-on-swarm attrition — a critical gap if Taiwan, Korea, or the Baltics ignite.
- ~50% of friendly drones are killed by friendly fire:
No working IFF (Identification-Friend-or-Foe) for low-end drones; EW interceptors jam anything emitting video.
- Legacy IFF doesn't fit:
Transponders cost more than the drone, are too heavy, and emit RF that lets the enemy target friendlies.
- Solving this doubles the arsenal:
+3.5M effective drones/yr for Ukraine today; a ready-to-deploy IFF layer for the US before peer conflict.
- Ground-truthed with operators:
Built with the founder of DWARF Engineering, Ukraine's leading UAV-stack scaleup — kill-zone reality, not Pentagon theory.

TECHNICAL
- Steganographic watermark, invisible to the enemy:
HMAC-SHA256 marker hidden in unused VBI lines of the analog video stream — undetectable without the key, so the enemy can't use it to target friendlies (the failure mode of every other IFF).
- Unforgeable and unreplayable:
Rolling counter blocks replay; pre-shared key never goes over air; hierarchical keys (master → unit → drone) limit blast radius if a drone is captured.
- Zero added BOM, zero new procurement:
Firmware-only on the drone (Betaflight + MAX7456 OSD chip); ~$50 receiver on the EW side ($15 capture card + $35 Raspberry Pi). One-frame decision latency (~16ms).
- 7-signal fusion, 6 states, one-way safety invariant:
Degraded signals can only lower confidence, never raise. Crypto decides; gated YOLOv8n only corroborates — unvalidated ML can never promote a drone to "friendly."
- Distribution flywheel:
Free Betaflight/Kordyceps integration → MoD-mandated logistics-stage flash (NATO IFF model) → per-drone OEM license → sub-cent pay-per-contact at scale.
- Working demo today:
ESP32 firmware ↔ Python receiver byte-identical; React mission control; 17/17 tests green.

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Markdown version of https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/3rd-annual-natsec-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/67. Site index for agents: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms.txt · full text: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms-full.txt