Simulation and assessment of battery depletion attacks on unmanned aerial vehicles for crisis management infrastructures

Abstract The article discusses the problem of simulation and assessment of battery depletion attacks on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in crisis management systems. These devices operate in security sensitive infrastructures, thus, they are subject to accidental incidents or intentional ones performed by an attacker, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks or sabotage accidents. The drones are particularly subject to battery depletion attacks, which exploit their autonomy, their physical movements in space, their wire and wireless communication channels, or even all together. The article classifies, first, various battery depletion attacks on an UAV and presents their analysis. Next, we describe how we adapted a Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 to the needs of a crisis management scenario by adding specific hardware control and monitoring units as well as made empirical studies on it. Simulation and experiments allowed us to confirm the feasibility of such attacks in practice, evaluate and compare their effect.