PSAT – A Package Structure Analyzation Tool to Regain Control of Hijacked Drones

Today’s air space becomes more and more crowded as drones become part of it. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have expanded beyond military use to include hobby and commercial purposes. Independent of use-cases it is important to identify and track drones in order to prevent accidents or regain control of hijacked drones to taking measures to neutralize them before they can cause harm. Therefore, it is essential to sniff the communication, to analyse it, and if needed to adapt the navigation payload to jam the original control receiving control back. For this purpose PSAT was developed to sniff and analyze drone communication. It is a highly flexible tool developed for standard drone communications like IEEE 802.15.4, 5G, and LoRa. PSAT was successfully tested with the Yunecc Typhoon H3 communication with the ground station controller via IEEE E802.15.4. With the detailed payload anlaysis of communication patterns modified packages can be constructed to overwrite existing navigation commands gaining control back.