Yuval Elovici

Senior Academic

Security Vulnerabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Countermeasures

An Experimental Study

Vishal Dey, Vikramkumar Pudi, Anupam Chattopadhyay, Yuval Elovici

Drones present a novel airborne platform for new commercial and consumer tasks. Due to their increasing use, security analysis has become necessary. In this paper, we present a collection of fatal attacks, minor observations and associated security vulnerabilities for DJI Phantom 4 Pro(P4P) and Parrot Bebop 2 drones. We also propose some countermeasures to bolster the security of the analyzed drones. In addition to this, we provided a brief overview of the system and embedded architecture of these vehicles. Although DJI has tried to improve security by introducing radio communication and partially encrypted firmware, the P4P still remains vulnerable to GPS spoofing, jamming and other vulnerabilities through DJI-SDK has been exposed in our experimental study. In contrast, Bebop drones are more vulnerable to wireless attacks and we have experimentally validated this for Bebop 2 drone.

Publication language English
Pages 398-403
Publication status Published - 27.03.2018

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Hardware and Architecture
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Access to Document
10.1109/VLSID.2018.97
Other files and links
Link to publication in Scopus