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1. Manipulating Drone Position Control

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CNS.2019.8802817  

   Chen, Wenxin ; Dong, Yingfei ; Duan, Zhenhai ( June 2019 , 2019 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS))

   Although consumer drones have been used in many attacks, besides specific methods such as jamming, very little research has been conducted on systematical methods to counter these drones. In this paper, we develop generic methods to compromise drone position control algorithms in order to make malicious drones deviate from their targets. Taking advantage of existing methods to remotely manipulate drone sensors through cyber or physical attacks (e.g., [1], [2]), we exploited the weaknesses of position estimation and autopilot controller algorithms on consumer drones in the proposed attacks. For compromising drone position control, we first designed two state estimation attacks: a maximum False Data Injection (FDI) attack and a generic FDI attack that compromised the Kalman-Filter-based position estimation (arguably the most popular method). Furthermore, based on the above attacks, we proposed two attacks on autopilot-based navigation, to compromise the actual position of a malicious drone. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first piece of work in this area. Our analysis and simulation results show that the proposed attacks can significantly affect the position estimation and the actual positions of drones. We also proposed potential countermeasures to address these attacks.
2. Wind awareness for energy consumption in drone simulations (demo paper)

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3557915.3561045  

   Kelleher, Noah ; Ramirez, Ricardo ; Salihovic, Adnan ; McKay, Nathan ; Kelly, Jonathan ; Chen, Hengwei ; Trajcevski, Goce ( November 2022 , 30th International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, SIGSPATIAL 2022)

   Drone simulators are often used to reduce training costs and prepare operators for various ad-hoc scenarios, as well as to test the quality of algorithmic and communication aspects in collaborative scenarios. An important aspect of drone missions in simulated (as well as real life) environments is the operational lifetime of a given drone, in both solo and collaborative fleet settings. Its importance stems from the fact that the capacity of the on-board batteries in untethered (i.e., free-flying) drones determines the range and/or the length of the trajectory that a drone can travel in the course of its surveilance or delivery missions. Most of the existing simulators incorporate some kind of a consumption model based on different parameters of the drone and its flight trajectory. However, to our knowledge, the existing simulators are not capable of incorporating data obtained from actual physical measurements/observations into the consumption model. In this work, we take a first step towards enabling the (users of) drones simulator to incorporate the speed and direction of the wind into the model and monitor its impact on the battery consumption as the direction of the flight changes relative to the wind. We have also developed a proof-of-concept implementation withmore »DJI Mavic 3 and Parrot ANAFI drones.« less
3. Security of GPS/INS Based On-road Location Tracking Systems

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SP.2019.00068  

   Narain, Sashank ; Ranganathan, Aanjhan ; Noubir, Guevara ( May 2019 , 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP))

   Location information is critical to a wide variety of navigation and tracking applications. GPS, today's de-facto outdoor localization system has been shown to be vulnerable to signal spoofing attacks. Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) are emerging as a popular complementary system, especially in road transportation systems as they enable improved navigation and tracking as well as offer resilience to wireless signals spoofing and jamming attacks. In this paper, we evaluate the security guarantees of INS-aided GPS tracking and navigation for road transportation systems. We consider an adversary required to travel from a source location to a destination and monitored by an INS-aided GPS system. The goal of the adversary is to travel to alternate locations without being detected. We develop and evaluate algorithms that achieve this goal, providing the adversary significant latitude. Our algorithms build a graph model for a given road network and enable us to derive potential destinations an attacker can reach without raising alarms even with the INS-aided GPS tracking and navigation system. The algorithms render the gyroscope and accelerometer sensors useless as they generate road trajectories indistinguishable from plausible paths (both in terms of turn angles and roads curvature). We also design, build and demonstrate that themore »magnetometer can be actively spoofed using a combination of carefully controlled coils. To experimentally demonstrate and evaluate the feasibility of the attack in real-world, we implement a first real-time integrated GPS/INS spoofer that accounts for traffic fluidity, congestion, lights, and dynamically generates corresponding spoofing signals. Furthermore, we evaluate our attack on ten different cities using driving traces and publicly available city plans. Our evaluations show that it is possible for an attacker to reach destinations that are as far as 30 km away from the actual destination without being detected. We also show that it is possible for the adversary to reach almost 60--80% of possible points within the target region in some cities. Such results are only a lower-bound, as an adversary can adjust our parameters to spend more resources (e.g., time) on the target source/destination than we did for our performance evaluations of thousands of paths. We propose countermeasures that limit an attacker's ability, without the need for any hardware modifications. Our system can be used as the foundation for countering such attacks, both detecting and recommending paths that are difficult to spoof.« less
4. A Security Assessment for Consumer WiFi Drones

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICII.2019.00011  

   Gordon, Joshua ; Kraj, Victoria ; Hwang, Ji Hun ; Raja, Ashok ( November 2019 , 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet (ICII))

   Small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become an increased presence in recent years due to their decreasing price and ease of use. Similarly, ways to detect drones through easily accessible programs like WireShark have raised more potential threats, including an increase in ease of jamming and spoofing drones utilizing commercially of the shelf (COTS) equipment like software defined radio (SDR). Given these advancements, an active area of research is drone security. Recent research has focused on using a HackRF SDR to perform eavesdropping or jamming attacks; however, most have failed to show a proposed remediation. Similarly, many research papers show post analysis of communications, but seem to lack a conclusive demonstration of command manipulation. Our security assessment shows clear steps in the manipulation of a WiFi drone using the aircrack-ng suite without the need for additional equipment like a SDR. This shows that anyone with access to a computer could potentially take down a drone. Alarmingly, we found that the COTS WiFi drone in our experiment still lacked the simple security measure of a password, and were very easily able to take over the drone in a deauthorization attack. We include a proposed remediation to mitigate the preformed attack andmore »assess the entire process using the STRIDE and DREAD models. In doing so, we demonstrate a full attack process and provide a resolution to said attack.« less
5. Compromising Flight Paths of Autopiloted Drones

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2019.8798162  

   Chen, Wenxin ; Dong, Yingfei ; Duan, Zhenhai ( June 2019 , 2019 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS))

   While more and more consumer drones are abused in recent attacks, there is still very little systematical research on countering malicious consumer drones. In this paper, we focus on this issue and develop effective attacks to common autopilot control algorithms to compromise the flight paths of autopiloted drones, e.g., leading them away from its preset paths. We consider attacking an autopiloted drone in three phases: attacking its onboard sensors, attacking its state estimation, and attacking its autopilot algorithms. Several firstphase attacks have been developed (e.g., [1]–[4]); second-phase attacks (including our previous work [5], [6]) have also been investigated. In this paper, we focus on the third-phase attacks. We examine three common autopilot algorithms, and design several attacks by exploiting their weaknesses to mislead a drone from its preset path to a manipulated path. We present the formal analysis of the scope of such manipulated paths. We further discuss how to apply the proposed attacks to disrupt preset drone missions, such as missing a target in searching an area or misleading a drone to intercept another drone, etc. Many potential attacks can be built on top of the proposed attacks. We are currently investigating different models to apply such attacks onmore »common drone missions and also building prototype systems on ArduPilot for real world tests. We will further investigate countermeasures to address the potential damages.« less