Johns Hopkins Scientists Show How Easy It Is to Hack a Drone and Crash It

by Phil Sneiderman, Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) researchers have raised concerns about how easily hackers could cause unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to ignore human controllers and potentially crash.They discovered three ways to send rogue commands from a laptop to interfere with an airborne hobby drone’s normal operation and crash it.

“The value of our work is in showing that the technology in these drones is highly vulnerable to hackers,” says JHU researcher Lanier A. Watkins. The researchers attacked a drone with 1,000 wireless connection requests in rapid succession, each asking for control of the UAV. The digital barrage overloaded the device’s central processing unit, causing it to shut down and go into “an uncontrollable landing.”

In a separate experiment, the researchers transmitted to the drone an exceptionally large data packet that exceeded the capacity of the buffer allocated for such information within the UAV’s flight application.

For a third exploit, the researchers repeatedly sent a fake digital packet from their laptop to the drone’s controller, telling it the packet’s sender was the drone itself. “We demonstrated here that not only could someone remotely force the drone to land, but they could also remotely crash it in their yard and just take it,” Watkins says.  Article