Replies

By Aliya Sternstein April 27, 2015

Research studies on drone vulnerabilities published in recent years essentially provided hackers a how-to guide for hijacking unmanned aircraft, an Israeli defense manufacturer said Monday.

A reallife downing of a CIA stealth drone by Iranians occurred a month after one such paper was published, noted Esti Peshin, director of cyber programs for Israel Aerospace Industries, a major defense contractor. In December 2011, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Iran navigated a CIA unmanned aerial vehicle safely down to the ground by manipulating the aircraft’s GPS coordinates.

The 2011 study, co-authored by Nils Ole Tippenhauer of ETH Zurich and other ETH and University of California academics, was titled “The Requirements for Successful GPS Spoofing Attacks.” The scholars detailed how to mimic GPS signals to fool GPS receivers that aid navigation.

“Its a PDF fileâ€¦ essentially, a blueprint for hackers, Peshin said.

Peshin said she does not know whether the CIA drone was overtaken using GPS spoofing or even whether the attacker read the study. But she underscored how easily available the publication is online.

“You can Google, just look up ‘Tippenhauer its the first result in Google. Look up ‘UAV cyberattacks’ — itâ€™s the third one. ‘UAV GPS spoofing attacks the first one,” Peshin said. She was speaking at the Defensive Cyberspace Operations and Intelligence conference, an Israeli-American summit held in Washington.

In the study, the researchers explained where an attacker must be located to generate fake signals capable of fooling GPS receivers. They also described ways to replace legitimate signals with an attacker’s bogus signals, so the target ends up “losing the ability to calculate its position.”

Read at: http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2015/04/heres-how-you-hack-drone/111229/