Safeguarding Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Against Side Channel Analysis Via Motor Noise Injection

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2022

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Source Publication

2022 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST)

Source ISSN

978-1-6654-8532-6

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1109/HOST54066.2022.9839837

Abstract

We first investigate the efficacy of side channel anal-ysis (SCA) based attacks to recover the encryption key from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We then propose a method based on noise injection to safeguard against this type of attack. The proposed noise injection method is unique because it prioritizes low power consumption and uses as a noise source the motors of the UAV system. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiments on a real quadcopter. It is found that when noise injection is not applied, the encryption key can be recovered through correlation power analysis. In contrast, the same key is not recoverable when the proposed noise injection method is applied. The implemented solution is efficient and does not negatively effect the flight stability or control of the UAV because its execution time overhead is negligible inside the control loop. In addition, it consumes a negligible amount of power. These results demonstrate that mitigation of SCA attacks without expanding the complexity or negatively effecting the flight operations of drones is achievable.

Comments

Published in the proceedings of the conference 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), June 27-30, 2022: 65-68. DOI.



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