We propose PiNcH, a methodology to detect the presence of a drone and its current status leveraging just the communication traffic exchanged between the drone and its Remote Controller (RC). PiNcH is built applying standard classification algorithms to the eavesdropped traffic, analyzing features such as packets inter-arrival time and size. PiNcH does not require either any special hardware or to transmit any signal. Indeed, it is fully passive and it resorts to cheap and general purpose hardware. To evaluate the effectiveness of our solution, we collected real communication measurements from the 3DR SOLO drone, being the most popular open-source hardware, running the widespread ArduCopter open-source firmware, mounted on-board on a wide range of commercial amateur drones. Then, we test our solution against different publicly available wireless traces. The results prove that PiNcH can efficiently and effectively: (i) identify the presence of the drone in several heterogeneous scenarios; (ii) identify the current state of a powered-on drone, i.e., flying or lying on the ground; (iii) discriminate the movement of the drone; and, finally, (iv) estimate a lower bound on the time required to identify a drone with the requested level of assurance. The quality and viability of our solution do prove that network traffic analysis can be successfully adopted for drone identification and pave the way for future research in the area.
Authors in @cite_32 show that the radio control signal sent to an UAV using a typical transmitter can be captured and analyzed to identify the controlling pilot using machine learning techniques. Authors collected messages exchanged between the drone and the remote controller and used them to train multiple classifiers. They observed that the best performance is reached by a random forest classifier achieving an accuracy of around 90 exploiting the same principle, i.e., classification of the traffic, this paper focuses on the pilot and not on the drone identification.
@cite_32
2789453091
Analysis of interactions with remotely controlled devices has been used to detect the onset of hijacking attacks, as well as for forensics analysis, e.g., to identify the human controller. Its effectiveness is known to depend on the remote device type as well as on the properties of the remote control signal. This paper shows that the radio control signal sent to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) using a typical transmitter can be captured and analyzed to identify the controlling pilot using machine learning techniques. Twenty trained pilots have been asked to fly a high-end research drone through three different trajectories. Control data have been collected and used to train multiple classifiers. Best performance has been achieved by a random forest classifier that achieved accuracy around 90 using simple time-domain features. Extensive tests have shown that the classification accuracy depends on the flight trajectory and that the pitch, roll, yaw, and thrust control signals show different levels of significance for pilot identification. This result paves the way to a number of security and forensics applications, including continuous identification of UAV pilots to mitigate the risk of hijacking.