If the beacon data happened to be encrypted, then breaking that encryption might be a violation of the law. Although you could just use directional finding to l

If the beacon data happened to be encrypted, then breaking that encryption might be a violation of the law. Although you could just use directional finding to locate the source of the beacon. That's assuming these animal collars transmit data at some interval without any input. A more secure system would be to have a call and response system using a secret key. Each collar would have a unique ID number, a unique private key, and a GPS receiver. The tracker system would contain a list of collar public keys and a GPS receiver as well. To find any specific collar, the tracker would use the public key to encrypt the ID number and a time stamp from the GPS data. Any collars in the vicinity would see the transmission, try to decrypt it, then compare the ID number with their own. If it's junk data, ignore the transmission. If the ID matches, the time stamp is compared with the collar's own GPS data to check if was anytime within the last few seconds (or however long it takes to lock onto a GPS signal). The collar would then reply with the ID number and GPS location data encrypted using the tracker's public key. The tracker receives the data, decrypts it, and displays the location on a map. Thus, the time stamping would prevent any replay attacks by only allowing the collars to respond when the real tracker is requesting its location. Controlling how often a collar is allowed to respond would prevent a replay attacker from getting any responses once the collar receives a legit request from the tracker. The only way to really attack this system would be to setup a directional finding system to pinpoint the location of the collar but this would only work during the times the tracker happens to be looking for an animal you are trying to poach. Another option is to steal the tracker device and beat a park ranger until they give up the password to it.