Mr. Jonathan Andersson, who is the manager and security researcher at Trend Micro’s TippingPoint DVLab division, demonstrated a small devise, which he has made, at the PacSec security conference in Tokyo, Japan on Wednesday last.
According to him, his device called Icarus can hijack any popular Drones mid-flight, allowing hackers to lock the owner out, and take complete control of the drones.
This tiny Icarus can also attack many radio-controlled devices like helicopters, cars, boats and other remote control gears that run over the most popular wireless transmission control protocol called DSMx. DSMx is a protocol used to facilitate communication between radio controllers and devices, including drones, helicopters, and cars etc.
Icarus works by taking effect of DSMx protocol which permits the hackers to take full control over targeted Drones that allows attackers to steer, accelerate, brake and even crash them.
What is the lacuna that permits the hackers? Andersson explained that the DSMx protocol does not encrypt the ‘secret’ key that pairs a controller and hobbyist device, which facilitate an attacker to extract this secret by launching several brute-force attacks. So, once the drone hijacker (Icarus) grabs the secret key, an attacker can send malicious commands to restrict the original owner of the drone from sending legitimate control commands, and instead, the drone will accept commands from the attacker.
Despite providing some patches and updated hardware, manufacturers have not been fully equipped with to provide a robust solution against such threats.
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