Identification of GPS Spoofing as a Drone Cyber-vulnerability and Evaluation of Efficacy of Asynchronous GPS spoofing

Abstract

With an aim of finding a countermeasure against rogue commercial drones, cyber vulnerabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were studied. In this paper out of the various well known cyber vulnerabilites of a UAV, Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing is identified as a vulnerability with highest risk in commercial drones. The reliance of semi-autonomous and autonomous drones on GPS/ Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals is ubiquitous for positioning and navigation. A number of research papers have explored and shown the vulnerability of commercial drones’ GPS receivers against spoofing. The results of a successful GPS spoofing attack can have extreme consequences with respect to the safety of the mission, equipment, payload, infrastructure and most importantly human lives. In this paper an attempt is made to evaluate the efficacy of an asynchronous GPS spoofing attack as a countermeasure against commercial drones. The success of this attack in previous research works was found to be the absence of any countermeasure in the commercial drones against GPS spoofing. In this paper asynchronous GPS Spoofing is found to be ineffective against a commercial drone contrary to previous research works in this field.