Evaluation of DoS attacks on Commercial Wi-Fi-Based UAVs

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges for the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in large-scale real-world applications is security. However, most of research projects related to robotics does not discuss security issues, moving on directly to studying classical problems (i.e., perception, control, planning). This paper evaluates the effects of availability issues (Denial of Service attacks) in two commonly used commercially available UAVs (AR.Drone 2.0 and 3DR SOLO). Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are made while the vehicles are navigating, simulating common conditions found both by the general public and in a research scenario. Experiments show how effective such attacks are and demonstrate actual security breaches that create specific vulnerabilities. The results indicate that both studied UAVs are susceptible to several types of DoS attacks which can critically influence the performance of UAVs during navigation, including a decrease in camera functionality, drops in telemetry feedback and lack of response to remote control commands. We also present a tool that can be used as a failsafe mechanism to alert the user when a drone is reaching out a determined flight limit range, avoiding availability issues.

Understanding and Securing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Services: A Comprehensive Tutorial

“…d) DoS attack: Denial of Service (DoS) attacks may allow malicious users to incapacitate a UAV system. In this scenario, the attacker can flood the target UAV's network with numerous requests, overloading its resources and disrupting its availability [105]. The impact of such attacks on UAVs may vary from significant network delays and reduced video streaming quality for the user to total service loss.…”

Autonomous aerial robotics for package delivery: A technical review

“…DOS attacks have been found to influence the performance of the UAV negatively. Including a decrease in sensor functionality, drops in telemetry feedback, and reduced response to remote control commands (Vasconcelos et al, 2019). If the data link is unencrypted, a malicious actor could take control and perform different control commands (Hooper et al, 2016).…”

IoT Crawler with Behavior Analyzer at Fog layer for Detecting Malicious Nodes

“…In Denial of Service (DoS) [89] attack, the intruder tries in different ways to consume the network resources to block out legitimate users in the network. For instance, flooding the traffic to consume bandwidth or CPU time is an example.…”