Exploiting the Vulnerabilities in MAVLink Protocol for UAV Hijacking

The MAVLink protocol serves as the cornerstone for control communications between ground control systems (GCS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), facilitating essential control communication. Despite its widespread adoption, the protocol's security mechanisms have raised significant concerns. This work focuses on the design vulnerabilities of the MAVLink protocol v2.0 including the deficiency in message authentication code (MAC) mechanism and lapses in sequence number verification. Also, this research reveals the implementation loopholes (as findings) in the well-known GCS software (Mission Planner) for updating the secret key and in the widely used UAV emulation (ArduPilot) for examining invalid timestamps. This breach paves the way for the injection of malicious messages, culminating in the potential hijacking of the UAV. In response to these issues, we propose several countermeasures including a solution using the public key-based signature. The efficacy of both the attack methods and the countermeasures is validated through a series of experiments conducted within a controlled testbed environment.