Forget nets, attack drones, or lasers – Korean researchers have found a way to coax rogue drones out of the sky – at least, most of those flying on GPS autopilot.

“This technology can safely guide a drone to a desired location without any sudden change in direction in emergency situations,” according to national research university KAIST.

Spoof GPS signals have been tried before, according to KAIST, but can push the drone into what the team describes as ‘GPS safety mode’ – various emergency fail-safe modes, that differ between manufacturers, intended to promote drone safety when GPS signals are judged to be unreliable in some way – leading, for example, to the drone freezing in position and continuing to disrupt an airport.

Led by electrical engineer Professor Yongdae Kim, the KAIST team analysed what put various drones into a GPS safety mode and what switched them back to GPS navigation, and from this designed a drone abduction technique that “covers almost all the types of drone GPS safety modes, and is universally applicable to any drone that uses GPS regardless of model or manufacturer”, said the university.

“Conventional consumer drones equipped with GPS safety mode seem to be safe from fake GPS signals, however, most of these drones are able to be detoured since they detect GPS errors in a rudimentary manner,” said Kim.

The method is detailed in ‘Tractor beam: Safe-hijacking of consumer drones with adaptive GPS spoofing‘, a paper in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security.

According to the paper, after software simulations and field tests on four drones ( DJI Phantom 3 Standard, DJI Phantom 4, Parrot Bebop 2, 3DR Solo) “the strategies can force them to move in any direction with high accuracy”.

Photos:

The team (from top right clockwise): Professor Yongdae Kim, Yujin Kwon, Juhwan Noh, Hocheol Shin, and Dohyun Kim.

The test set-up: Spoof GPS signal produced by the PC are sent to the drone by  directional antenna.