Effects of Hacking an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Connected to the Cloud
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Date
2018-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Control systems with commercial and even military applications are utilizing more networked technologies to perform tasks associated with navigation and communication. Increasingly, these systems are experiencing cyber-attacks due to the interconnections with the internet and inter-operability protocols. Current research focuses on improving performance of a control system or improving cryptography methods separately; however, there is a need to understand the joint design of control and cyber-security methods in order to combat the growing cyber-attacks on these systems. Here, we seek to begin bridging this gap by determining how commonly employed cyber-attacks impact the performance criteria of control systems so that future research can aim for strong joint design. For this work, the control system of choice is the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0, which is a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV sends navigation-related sensor data to the cloud to determine a control command to be executed by the UAV. There, we simulate an attacker and perform two common attacks, Denial of Service and Man in the Middle. For Man in the Middle, we leverage ARP spoofing which then allows the attacker to read the data streaming in and out of the cloud and manipulate it. To understand the effects of this attacker, we ran simulation tests using ROS and Gazebo. These tests added network traffic, manipulated velocities, added delays, and replayed messages to the UAV, which was tasked with following a line and landing on a target tag autonomously. Performance metrics such as spatial velocities, location, delays, and end state are analyzed for the tests and compared to a UAV not under attack. The analysis of the results highlights the weaknesses in this networked setup along with degree of damage and disruption this type of cyber-attack can impose on a UAV.
Description
2018 IEEE Region 2 Student Activities Conference, 1st place paper competition
2018 Denman Undergraduate Research Forum, 2nd place in Math, Computation, and Analytics
2018 Denman Undergraduate Research Forum, 2nd place in Math, Computation, and Analytics
Keywords
cyber-security, unmanned aerial vehicle, control systems, cyber-attacks