European Defense Tech Hackathon

Hackathon

Driving European defense innovation through collaboration and real-world solutions

13.11.2025

The European Defense Tech Hackathon brought together 200+ hackers from across Europe in Berlin in November 2025, just ahead of the Berlin Security Conference. For four focused days, technologists, operators, investors, and public sector leaders collaborated to accelerate European defense innovation.

Co-hosted with the Cyber Innovation Hub of the Bundeswehr, the innovation arm of the Bundeswehr, the hackathon aimed to bridge the gap between builders and real operational needs. The emphasis was on practical, dual-use solutions shaped by frontline feedback and built with deployment in mind.

Scrambler

At Berlin EDHT, we built Scrambler: a hackathon project focused on one urgent challenge in modern drone operations—how to protect analog video feeds without sacrificing speed.

Our project started from a simple observation: analog FPV/video links are still widely used because they are fast and lightweight, but they are usually transmitted in the clear.

The Problem

Analog Is Fast, but Exposed, analog transmission is great for near real-time visibility, but it comes with a serious weakness:

Unencrypted broadcast: analog video can be received directly
Easy interception: adversaries with simple receivers can watch live footage
Operational risk: exposed positions, reconnaissance, and planning information

In short, the current model is low-latency—but also high-risk.

Why We Still Care About Analog

A key point in our exploration was this tradeoff:

Moving to digital encryption can introduce processing overhead
More processing means higher power use and added latency
For drones, both latency and battery life are mission-critical

So the question became: can we improve confidentiality while preserving analog-speed behavior?

Our Solution

Scrambler proposes an inline architecture:

Drone side: analog feed passes through a Scrambler
Controller side: feed is restored by a paired Descrambler

This creates an encrypted/scrambled channel model while preserving the operational advantages of analog-style transmission.

What Scrambler Does

From the project deck, the scrambler pipeline includes visual-signal transformations such as:

Operation A — Horizontal Permutation
Operation C — Pixel Shift

These operations are intended to make intercepted video unintelligible without the matching descrambler.

Why This Hackathon Build Matters

Scrambler is an early but practical step toward improving confidentiality for low-latency drone video links.

The core idea is simple: keep what analog does best (speed), and reduce what it does worst (being trivially interceptable).

Next Steps

Expand and validate the scrambling/descrambling pipeline under real conditions
Harden pairing and key-management flow
Measure latency, power, and signal quality in repeatable test scenarios
Move from prototype demonstration toward deployable module design

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