Control-Aware Manipulation of ArduPilot via Legitimate MAVLink Commands: Simulation and Hardware Validation
It exposes critical security vulnerabilities in UAV flight controllers, highlighting the need for robust input validation and state monitoring to prevent remote crashes.
The paper demonstrates six control-aware attacks on ArduPilot-based UAVs that exploit parameter changes via legitimate MAVLink commands, causing loss of control and crashes in both simulation and hardware validation.
This paper investigates control-aware attacks against ArduPilot-based Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), inwhich an adversary exploits the sensitivity of flight-controller dynamics to parameter changes to cause loss of control and crashes. It describes six attacks that exploit interactions among multi-layer controllers by modifying Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) gains, altering Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) estimation configuration, and violating failsafe assumptions, thereby forcing ArduPilot into unsafe operating conditions. We evaluate the attacks in Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) simulation and validate them on a Pixhawk 2.4.8 hardware platform. The results show that short sequences of well-formed MAVLink messages can exploit controller sensitivity to parameter values and updates frequency, affecting controller states and degrading attitude stability, angular-rate behavior, trajectory tracking, and estimator health. We demonstrate that when multiple effects are combined, the vehicle can enter an unsafe state and crashes. These findings show that security gaps in input-parameter handling, command trust, and controller-state validation can be exploited to cause loss of control and crashes in UAVs.