Vulnerability analysis of the Mavlink protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Recently, interest in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has increased, and unmanned aircraft are utilized in various fields. Especially UAVs are used for rescue systems, disaster detection, and military purposes, as well as for leisure and commercial purposes. However, since UAVs are increasingly used not only for positive purposes but also for negative ones, it is necessary to detect and neutralize malicious drones.

In this paper, we proposed a method of controlling UAVs and analyzed its operation structure, the MAVLink protocol which is a communication protocol of UAVs. We also experimented with ICMP flooding and packet injection attacks which disables UAVs by exploiting the vulnerability of the MAVLink protocol. Especially, we exploited the vulnerability of the MAVLink waypoint protocol to perform an experiment to disable a UAV executing a mission. As a result of the experiment, we confirmed that the attacked UAV was stopped and the mission disabled. ⓒ 2017 DGIST