Tractor beam

safe-hijacking of consumer drones with adaptive gps spoofing

Juhwan Noh, Yujin Kwon, Yunmok Son, Hocheol Shin, Dohyun Kim, Jaeyeong Choi, and Yongdae Kim

Spread of drone terrorism

As drones become increasingly ubiquitous, they are being used for a variety of purposes such as search and rescue, natural disaster preparedness and response, and data acquisition for geographic information systems. However, consumer drones are also being increasingly utilized by terrorists. For instance, in 2015, a Japanese anti-nuclear protester used a drone to drop a radioactive material onto the roof of Japan’s prime minister’s office (link). Further, Islamic State reportedly used drones to attack and kill troops with explosives in 2016 (link), and DJI M600 drones carrying explosives attempted to attack Venezuela’s president and other officials in 2018 (link).

limitation of existing anti-drone techniques

Shooting net

It takes too much time to capture the drone. The range of a net shooter is only about 100 m; therefore, a certain amount of time is needed to physically approach the target drone. For a large airport with area in the thousands of hectares, it may take several minutes to get to the target drone, which is enough time for a dangerous drone to reach its target and explode.

radio signal jamming

Jamming can disable remote controllers and prevent drones from moving further. However, dangerous items that pose a risk of collateral damage will still remain in the protected area that must be guarded from terrorism such as military bases and critical infrastructures.

laser attack

The laser destroys the surface of target drones. It prevents the drones from moving further, but the drone body and dangerous item will still remain in the protected area. Also, it can affect other things in a direct path from a laser device to a target drone.

We introduce a new anti-drone technique "Tractor beam"

Tractor Beam can expel the intruding drone from the protected area remotely in a short time. It is based on GPS spoofing attack, which manipulates GPS location of GPS receivers by using counterfeit GPS signal.

Of course, it is well-known that GPS spoofing can be used for hijacking drones. However, when you try it, it does not work. This is because of fail safe mechanism implemented on different drones.

The major contribution of this paper is:

to analyze fail safe mechanisms used in different drones,
to design mechanisms to bypass/misuse those fail safe mechanisms to hijack consumer drones,
to confirm those mechanisms through real-world experiments.

Tractor Beam is successfully demonstrated on DJI Phantom 3, DJI Phantom 4, Parrot Bebop 2, and 3DR Solo through field experiments and software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulations. However, we believe our technology can be extended to other fail safe mechanisms.

Detailed information: link

Demo video clips: link

Frequently asked questions: link

Paper information

Juhwan Noh, Yujin Kwon, Yunmok Son, Jaeyeong Choi, Hocheol Shin, Dohyun Kim, and Yongdae Kim, "Tractor Beam: Safe-hijacking of Consumer Drones with Adaptive GPS Spoofing", ACM Transactions of Privacy and Security, Vol. 22, No. 2, Article 12, 2019

Download the paper from KAIST: pdf

Download the paper from ACM: pdf

@article{noh2019tractor,

  title={Tractor Beam: Safe-hijacking of Consumer Drones with Adaptive GPS Spoofing},

  author={Noh, Juhwan and Kwon, Yujin and Son, Yunmok and Shin, Hocheol and Kim, Dohyun and Choi, Jaeyeong and Kim, Yongdae},

  journal={ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS)},

  volume={22},

  number={2},

  pages={12},

  year={2019},

  publisher={ACM}

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