UHM ROTC CyberSecurity Research: Countering Consumer Drones
Abstract
Goals: The objectives of this project are to engage cadets in concrete research and development with clear learning goals. Therefore, they are able to engage cyber security and drone security research tasks, grasp critical skills in cyber operations, signals intelligence, and electronic warfare, and learn key methods in analysis, software development, and hardware design. We will build our projects based on open-source software and open-source hardware projects to give hands on experiences for cadets to learn the state-of-the-art technologies.Research Focuses: In this project, we will investigate the security vulnerabilities and countermeasures of consumer drones (also called small unmanned aerial systems, sUASs.) We have a collection of such drones and have conducted several research projects on drone security in the past years, including basic hijacking, traffic sniffing, and several drone countermeasures. We will further explore more vulnerabilities and countermeasures to deal with these drones.Technical Approaches: We will focus on two main research topics: drone identification, and drone countermeasures. PI Dong has been working on drone security research since 2014, and is advising six PhD and MS graduate students in cyber security areas. They will help the PI to tutor ROTC cadets in the proposed areas. In the past two years, the PI had worked with UHM ROTCcommanders and recruited 8 cadets at UHM for AFRL ROTC research projects. Four of them have graduated and joined military services, and three of them will return on this project as group leads. PI also recruited a new EE Master student (Army ROTC) to join this project this semester. We will recruit more cadets majoring in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering. Outcomes: In our first direction, we will focus on WiFi traffic analysis using machine learning approaches, to build drone profiles, monitor their behaviors, and identify repeated patterns or critical events. We will build software prototype systems to sniff drone communication traffic and further generate drone communication patterns and intelligence reports. In our second direction, we will explore remote hardware solutions to compromise drone sensors. We have demonstrated the feasibility of this idea in our current research, and we will further develop precisesolutions to build powerful drone countermeasures by smooth GPS spoofing.Enhance DoD capabilities: Cadets will learn fundamental computer and cyber skills in this project. (1) One group will learn key network traffic sniffing and analysis methods, design drone traffic analysis algorithms, and implement them using the most popular open-source data analysis tools (Python packages). They will work with one of the most powerful open-source security tools (Kali Linux), the most popular open-source drone control system (ArduPilot), and many other open-source tools. (2) Another group will work with open-source software-defined radio cards (SDRs) to conduct signal intelligence and countermeasure research. We will use HackRF cards and BladeRF cards, and open-source SDR software packages to produce corresponding signals for attacks.We have recruited 3 women and Hawaiian ROTC cadets in the past two years on our projects, and we will further work with Native Hawaii Mentor Program and Society of Women Engineers at our college to promote underrepresented students in our projects.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 16, 2019
- Source ID
- N000142012049
Entities
People
- Yingfei Dong
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Hawaiʻi System