Cyber Attacks and Vulnerabilities Assessment for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Communication Systems

In the developing world, the trend of using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is being increased in many fields. These UAVs are now available in many different versions which ranges from children toy to military level combat equipment. Manufacturing companies are mostly mainly paying attention on reducing power consumption, high data transfer rate, less weight and more speed. However, by keeping focus on these features, most of the UAVs manufacturing companies overlook the factor of security and the risk in case of exploitation is ignored. This fact cannot be ignored that an exploited/hacked UAV with malicious intent can cause serious harm to the target in many ways. In the UAVs development, focus on the less computation power, restricted correspondence data transfer capacity, light weight data carrying limit and robustness captivity in UAVs has become a challenge for security practitioners and researchers. UAVs use numerous communication protocols and one among these protocols is Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) link protocol which is reliable as well as efficient. Currently, there are two versions of MAVlink communication protocol called MAVlink1 and MAVlink2. This protocol is used to establish a communication between Ground Control Station and UAV. The second version of this protocol (i.e. MAVlink2) is recent and there is not much data available about the potential exploitable vulnerabilities present in this protocol. This research paper has explored and identified security vulnerabilities in MAVlink2, specifically linked to the communication of UAV and their impact on UAV. The paper has further analyzed MAVlink2 communication protocol in order to exploit the vulnerabilities in the MAVlink2 protocol for hijacking the UAV.