Software Defined Radio based Security Analysis For Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Abstract

With the development of unmanned aerial systems (UAS), the ubiquitous deployment of UAS is becoming a trend. With the digital transceiver, the remote pilot can control the UAS remotely and effectively. With the deployment of 5G technology on a large scale, the convenience of remote control is becoming obvious and stable. However, the convenience of remote control technologies also brings more vulnerabilities to UAS. Software defined radio (SDR) has been explored to play system exploitation and penetration test for the radio system widely. With block programming, an SDR can become a hands-on system exploitation tool for research. With the adjustment of antennas and programmings, we can exploit the vulnerabilities of the UAS system and fixed the problem in advance. In this paper, we introduce an approach to leverage SDR to realize signal spoofing for GPS location and injection for digital communication. Based on SDR, we analyze the security of UAS on the GPS and digital connections. With the adjustment of antennas, we can define the SDR into a GPS spoofing tool and inject the packets in the communication of the digital transceiver. The evaluation shows the approach can delay the GPS searching for tens of minutes and disorder the connections between ground control station to UAS.