An analysis of GPS spoofing attack and efficient approach to spoofing detection in PX4

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are aerial vehicles that can go to a particular position without human control or with remote human control. It is because unmanned control mainly relies on position estimation that a lot of research has been studied on GPS spoofing attacks. Detection methods against GPS spoofing attacks mainly include monitoring RF signals or IMU sensor values inside UAVs. In this work, we analyze GPS attack and detection in an advanced autopilot system, PX4 without excluding RF detection. Recent studies have shown that GPS spoofing is unable to evade the detection using EKF sensor fusion. Therefore, this paper experiment whether the detection could be evaded by strengthening the attacker model. This paper classifies attacker models according to whether an attacker knows the true position of UAVs or the estimated position by UAV and proposed attack methods depending on each model in PX4. We inject GPS value which our attack method intends to UAV during mission flight in simulation environment. By manipulating the GPS driver code of PX4 controller, we inject GPS value the attack method wants into UAV in physical environment. Finally, we observed the innovation test ratio during GPS spoofing and demonstrate that GPS spoofing attack is possible keeping the innovation test ratio under the anomaly detection criterion. After that, we proposed our approach which scales the EKF’s Kalman gain randomly to increase the detection method’s efficiency and experiment with the attack methods. This detection method has little effect on the test ratio without the attack. But during the attack, the innovation test ratio was increased higher than the anomaly detection criterion so that the attack could be detected.