A Drone Tale: All Your Drones Belong To Us

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Presented at hacktivity2018 2018 by

In 2013, DJI Drones quickly gained the reputation as the most stable platform for use in aerial photography and other fields. Since then Drones have increased their field of application and are actively used across various industries (law enforcement and first responders, utility companies, governments and universities) to perform critical operations on daily basis. As a result of that, Drones security has also become a hot topic in the industry.This talk will provide a comprehensive overview of the security model and security issues affecting the underlying technologies, including existing vulnerabilities in the radio signals, Wi-Fi, Chipset, FPV system, GPS, App and SDK. As part of the presentation, we will discuss the architecture of one of the most famous and popular consumer drone product: the DJI Phantom 3. This model will be used to demonstrate each aspect of discovered security vulnerabilities, together with recommendations and mitigations. A special focus will be on the recent changes and countermeasures DJI has applied to the firmware of its products in order to harden the security, following the recent accusations and the US Army ban. While the topic of hacking drones by faking GPS signals has been shared before at major security conferences in the past, this talk will extend these aspects to include geo-fencing and no fly zones abuses.