Experimental Analysis of MAVLink Protocol Vulnerability on UAVs Security Experiment Platform

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have great potential in the field of information technology due to their flexible deployment, low energy consumption and high adaptability. However, incidents about negative use of UAVs have gradually increased. Therefore, it is urgent to disable malicious UAVs. In this paper, a UAVs security experiment platform has been built to simulate various attacks suffered by UAVs. On this platform, UAVs use the MAVLink protocol and communicate with the ground control station through a wireless network. We analyze and compare the two versions of the MAVLink protocol, which is one of the most widely used protocols for wireless network communication systems. We explore vulnerabilities in the MAVLink protocol and design the strategies of the DoS attack and the hijacking attack. Empirical researches are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of these attacks.