Defeating drone jamming with hardware sandboxing

In this work, we concern ourselves with the security of drone systems under jamming-based attacks. The focus is on design and synthesis structure with the anti-jamming security needs of drone systems. We explore a relatively new concept known as hardware sandboxing, to provide runtime monitoring of boundary signals and isolation through resource virtualization for non-trusted system-on-chip (SoC) components. We utilize Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based development and target embedded Linux for our drone hardware/software system containing the hardware sandbox. We design and implement our working concept on the Digilent Zybo FPGA, which uses the Xilinx Zynq system. Our design is validated via simulation-based tests to mimic jamming attacks and standalone, stationary tests with commercial transmitter and receiver equipment. In both cases, we are successful in detecting and isolating unwanted behavior.