Accurately Redirecting a Malicious Drone

Although some existing counterdrone measures can disrupt the invasion of certain consumer drone, to the best of our knowledge, none of them can accurately redirect it to a given location for defense. In this paper, we proposed a Drone Position Manipulation (DPM) attack to address this issue by utilizing the vulnerabilities of control and navigation algorithms used on consumer drones. As such drones usually depend on GPS for autopiloting, we carefully spoof GPS signals based on where we want to redirect a drone to, such that we indirectly affect its position estimates that are used by its navigation algorithm. By carefully manipulating these states, we make a drone gradually move to a path based on our requirements. This unique attack exploits the entire stack of sensing, state estimation, and navigation control together for quantitative manipulation of flight paths, different from all existing methods. In addition, we have formally analyzed the feasible range of redirected destinations for a given target. Our evaluation on open-source ArduPilot system shows that DPM is able to not only accurately lead a drone to a redirected destination but also achieve a large redirection range.