Researchers Find Drones Open to GPS Spoofing Attacks

16 Jul 2013

A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin put on a great show for Homeland Security when they hacked a drone, owned by the school, with nothing more than a homemade tool for spoofing.

While representatives from Homeland Security watched, the research team used GPS spoofing in order to hijack an unmanned drone and compel it to do their bidding by providing new coordinates.

What is GPS Spoofing?

GPS spoofing is a fairly simply attack that tricks a GPS receiver by providing a more powerful signal than the one its receiving from GPS satellites. These signals closely resemble existing signals. They are then altered slightly in order to direct the device to the location the spoofers desire.

In order for a spoofing attack to be successful, the spoofer needs to know the exact GPS location of the target so the spoofed signals can be created with the appropriate signal delays.

With spoofing, it is necessary to proceed cautiously with small alterations rather than one major direction change that results in the loss of signal lock completely, which is what happens when GPS jamming attempts are made.

The process itself was fairly simple and inexpensive. The total cost to create this spoofing tool was less than $1,000. The security implications are staggering according to University of Texas at Austin professor Todd Humphreys who says, “In 5 or 10 years you have 30,000 drones in the airspace,” to Fox News. “Each one of these could be a potential missile used against us.”

Humphreys isn’t the only one concerned over the potential security implications or risk this poses to U.S. interests. Milton R. Clary, senior Department of Defense aviation policy analyst for Overlook Systems Technologies said, “I think this demonstration should certainly raise some eyebrows and serve as a wake-up call of sorts as to how safe our critical infrastructure is from spoofing attacks.”

According to Humphreys, the goal of this project was to raise a red flag as early in the process as possible that there are very real vulnerabilities that need to be addressed in order to protect citizens from the potential of U.S. drone attacks once drones are allowed in U.S. airspace, which may happen as early as 2015.

Homeland Security is aware of the weaknesses of drone attacks and is currently working to solve the problems the GPS interface is causing. However, their work so far has been focused on preventing GPS jamming and not dealing with spoofing signals.

Iran claims to have already used GPS spoofing to capture one of the CIAs batwing stealth drones that was conducting flyovers in search of potential sites for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. This has not, however, been confirmed. They report studying drone technology in search of weaknesses since 2007.


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