Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’s Vulnerability to GPS Spoofing a Review

Abstract

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle often known as UAV plays a central role in providing multifarious services which can be encapsulated under following major categories namely military, research and civil. Various studies have revealed that unlike the military UAV the civil UAV uses unauthenticated, unencrypted and predictable signals and thus can be easily manipulated. With the burgeoning dependency on UAVs for time-critical response operations and many other, there is a need to secure the civil unmanned aerial system which lacks direct human interference. The goal of this paper is to focus on how Global Positioning System (GPS) signal spoofing allows the authentic ground control to change hands with threat actors. Spoofing forces erroneous location to be computed by target receiver by transmitting the counterfeit Global Navigation Satellite System like signals. The intention is to misinform the user about its location. In this paper, the UAVs vulnerability, resulting in complete command and control under the captor's influence, consequent to GPS spoofing, is analyzed and an analysis of the countermeasures to identify spoofing proposed by various researchers is done. While some countermeasures are computationally complex unsuitable for lightweight UAVs there are others that have been experimented on simulators. Very few have been established on real sensor data and have limitations of their own.