Gabriel Gonzalez, IOActive Director of Hardware Security presents full technical detail of his research into drone security and side-channel/fault injection attacks in this whitepaper.

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, continues to grow. Drones implement varying levels of security, with more advanced modules being resistant to typical embedded device attacks. IOActive’s interest is in developing one or more viable Fault Injection attacks against hardened UAVs.

This paper covers IOActive’s work in setting up a platform for launching side-channel and fault injection attacks using a commercially available UAV. We describe how we developed a threat model, selected a preliminary target, and prepared the components for attack, as well as discussing what we hoped to achieve and the final result of the project.