A Security Assessment for Consumer WiFi Drones

Abstract

Small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become an increased presence in recent years due to their decreasing price and ease of use. Similarly, ways to detect drones through easily accessible programs like WireShark have raised more potential threats, including an increase in ease of jamming and spoofing drones utilizing commercially of the shelf (COTS) equipment like software defined radio (SDR). Given these advancements, an active area of research is drone security. Recent research has focused on using a HackRF SDR to perform eavesdropping or jamming attacks; however, most have failed to show a proposed remediation. Similarly, many research papers show post analysis of communications, but seem to lack a conclusive demonstration of command manipulation. Our security assessment shows clear steps in the manipulation of a WiFi drone using the aircrack-ng suite without the need for additional equipment like a SDR. This shows that anyone with access to a computer could potentially take down a drone. Alarmingly, we found that the COTS WiFi drone in our experiment still lacked the simple security measure of a password, and were very easily able to take over the drone in a deauthorization attack. We include a proposed remediation to mitigate the preformed attack and assess the entire process using the STRIDE and DREAD models. In doing so, we demonstrate a full attack process and provide a resolution to said attack.