PRACTICAL GPS SPOOFING ATTACKS ON CONSUMER DRONES

Abstract

While the security of drones and unmanned automatic systems has become increasingly important, software vulnerabilities have been broadly examined but hardware vulnerabilities on these systems have not been well investigated. In this project, we utilize the recently popular software-defined radio cards to investigate vulnerability on these unmanned systems from both software and hardware aspects, epically focused on the security of civilian GPS receivers on consumer drones. We have developed a smart GPS spoofing attack framework on consumer drones, based on our understanding of the drone control software and the vulnerability of civilian GPS system. We will first introduce the background and related work on drone control systems and the GPS system; we will further present the design of our attack framework and our experimental results. Although simple GPS spoofing has been conducted in various settings, as far as we know, most of them are brute-force attacks without precise control. In this project, we have developed a practical framework to achieve better control of drone movement, based on the deep understanding of consumer drone specific issues. The proposed attack has been very successful in our lab environments; however, there are many practical challenges in field tests due to the limitation of the devices, field environments, and other reasons out of our control, e.g., wind speed. We have conducted many field tests to understand and address the practical limitations and show the capabilities of the proposed system. We will then present our research results and conclude this thesis with discussion and future work.