Development of a Drone Mounted Wireless Attack Platform
The commercial drone market has grown rapidly due to the increasing utility and capabilities of drones. Drones offer an invaluable resource to wireless hackers. Capitalizing on their mobility, a wireless hacker can equip a drone with hacking tools to circumvent physical security (e.g. fences) with relative ease and reach wireless networks. Wireless networks are inherently more susceptible to passive capture and injection attacks, which is exacerbated by the predominant use of Wi Fi's vulnerable security algorithms. Despite the impressive leaps drones have made, they are still noisy and hard to conceal. By equipping a drone with a directional antenna, this weakness can be mitigated and significantly improve their effective range. This research develops skypie version 2 (skypie v2) which is an improved software and hardware prototype designed for directional drone based attacks. To remain compatible with any drone, it is designed to be lightweight, inexpensive, and easily attachable to most off the shelf drones. These design choices also allow the prototype to simulate the capabilities an individual threat actor could produce. This research experimentally evaluates the ability of a drone mounted wireless attack platform (DWAP) equipped with a directional antenna to conduct wireless attacks effectively at distances greater than 800 meters. To test this hypothesis, the skypie v2 prototype conducts computer network attacks (CNAs) against a target network then captured data is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the platform. Results show that conducting CNAs from the prototype is possible well beyond the hypothesized 800 meters when utilizing a directional antenna. Capture of a WiFi Protected Access II (WPA2) handshake is possible at a Received Signal Strength