An Implementation-Based Study of the Detection of and Recovery from GPS Spoofing Attacks for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are expected to be a critical component for logistics, agriculture, defense and enabling connectivity for post-5G communications. The utilization of drones in diverse sectors raises concerns about their vulnerability to potential attacks that disrupt or obstruct their operational mechanisms. In this work, we first demonstrate how navigation attacks can compromise a drone’s system, using GPS jamming and spoofing attacks via HackRF One PortaPack Software Defined Radio (SDR) device. Next, we propose a mechanism called “Return-to-Start”, which can protect a drone from loss by responding promptly to such widely spread navigational attacks. We evaluate the effectiveness of our solution through experiments on a Raspberry Pi-based drone we developed. Our experiments validate the robustness of Return-to-Start functionality in a variety of attack scenarios with different durations and GPS geolocations.