Knocking My Neighbor's Kid's Cruddy Drone Offline

Architecture and Background

My neighbor’s kid is constantly flying his quad copter outside my windows. I see the copter has a camera and I know the little sexed crazed monster has been snooping around the neighborhood.

Vulnerability Analysis

With all of the hype around geo-fencing and drones, this got me to wondering: Would it be possible to force a commercial quad copter to land by sending a low-level pulse directly to it along the frequencies used by GPS? Of course, radio signal jamming is illegal in the U.S and, frankly, it would disrupt my electronics, too.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

In this presentation, we’ll look at some of the research and issues we encountered, when we attempted to force land two commercial drones (the new DJI Phantom 3 and the Parrot Bepop Drone) by sending GPS signals directly at the drones (while staying under the threshold for jamming and not disrupting anyone else). Michael Robinson has over 15 years of computer security experience and is currently a computer and mobile device forensic examiner in the Washington, DC area, where he deals with intrusion analysis, incident response, and criminal cases.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

For over four years he ran IT and IA operations for a Department of Defense agency. He has conducted research on security of mobile devices and is starting to play around in the drone space. He teaches computer forensics at the graduate level at Stevenson University in Maryland.