Analysis of the GPS Spoofing Vulnerability in the Drone 3DR Solo

Abstract

At present, the boom in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has been increasing in recent years, placing them in an important way in the commercial market. The use of UAV in the daily tasks of industry, commerce or as entertainment for children and adults becomes more recurrent. Each of the UAVs has a specific task, depending on the technologies that are provided, in addition to their basic functions with which they were manufactured. However, in most cases the security of these UAVs is not usually taken into account since some of them are inexpensive and do not have a robust security system that protects the data they send or receive for their operation, that can cause its communication system or the operating system that controls its basic functions of flight, landing, among others, to be compromised. These computer attacks could cause physical or moral harm to people around the same operator of the UAV because they could steal information related to the locations they have visited, or intercept images or videos taken by the UAV. This paper shows the exploitation of GPS vulnerability in the commercial drone of the company 3D Robotics, this vulnerability can cause a malicious user to have control of their autonomy, and carry out illicit activities, such as overflying in spaces not allowed as an airport and private areas. The exploitation of this vulnerability is important to make known that the UAVs should have a more robust security system and also give importance to the security of GPS since the only one that has security is the military GPS.

Cybersecurity in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

“…When an intruder uses Telnet, he could directly access the drone system to manipulate important system files and Shellcode script using Parrot to disrupt the system [42]. In a specific situation, the intruder can restart the drone in full, deactivating the drone's engines that triggers a drop on the ground [43].…”

On GPS spoofing of aerial platforms: a review of threats, challenges, methodologies, and future research directions

“…In 2016, another incident of UAV deception through GPS spoofing attack, was reported in which a US custom bureau's UAV was targeted by Mexican drug dealers and traffickers (Khan, Brohi & Jhanjhi, 2020). Moreover, similar GPS based spoofing attacks have also been demonstrated in several other works (Dey et al, 2018;Horton & Ranganathan, 2018;Arteaga et al, 2019;He & Qiao et al, 2019;He & Liu et al, 2019;Ma et al, 2020;Zheng & Sun, 2020) against Hornet Mini, DJI's Matrice 100, Phantom 3 and 4 Pro, 3DR Solo, Parrot's AR Drone 2.0 and Bebop 2 drones.…”

“…However, different research efforts have shown that GPS signals can be jammed or spoofed owing to its inherent vulnerabilities. Because of the low signal power (around −130 dBm), the GPS services can easily be disrupted through the transmission of high power jamming signals directed towards the victim platform ( Arteaga et al, 2019 ). Besides, the civil GPS services have no encryption or authentication mechanisms and therefore, the satellite signals can easily be replicated or fabricated, which can subsequently be utilized for launching sophisticated GPS spoofing attacks.…”

Private blockchain-envisioned security framework for AI-enabled IoT-based drone-aided healthcare services

“…Ullah et al [23] investigated the benefits of uses of 5G in various domains by considering several use cases. Arteaga et al [2] presented an exploitation of the "Global Positioning System (GPS)" vulnerability in commercial drones. Their identified vulnerability could help a malicious attacker to control autonomy and carry out other illegal tasks.…”