SkyJack is an
unmanned aerial vehicle
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or unmanned aircraft system (UAS), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft with no human pilot, crew, or passengers onboard, but rather is controlled remotely or is autonomous.De Gruyter Handbook of Dron ...
created by
Samy Kamkar
Samy Kamkar (born December 10, 1985) is an American privacy and security researcher, computer hacker and entrepreneur. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school. One year later, he co-founded Fonality, a unified communications company bas ...
which specifically seeks out other
Parrot drones and hijacks them through their wireless network, giving the SkyJack pilot the ability to control and view the camera sources of the affected drone.
Background
Parrot AR.Drone is a
radio controlled flying
quadcopter
A quadcopter, also called quadrocopter, or quadrotor is a type of helicopter or multicopter that has four rotors.
Although quadrotor helicopters and convertiplanes have long been flown experimentally, the configuration remained a curiosity ...
helicopter built by the French company
Parrot
Parrots (Psittaciformes), also known as psittacines (), are birds with a strong curved beak, upright stance, and clawed feet. They are classified in four families that contain roughly 410 species in 101 genus (biology), genera, found mostly in ...
. The drone is designed to be controlled by mobile or tablet operating systems such as the supported
iOS
Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...
or
Android.
No authentication or encryption is used by the Parrot to secure the connection with the pilot.
Description
Samy Kamkar
Samy Kamkar (born December 10, 1985) is an American privacy and security researcher, computer hacker and entrepreneur. At the age of 16, he dropped out of high school. One year later, he co-founded Fonality, a unified communications company bas ...
released the SkyJack hardware and software specification on December 2, 2013, as
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
and detailed the creation on his website.
According to the project's website:
SkyJack is a drone engineered to autonomously seek out, hack, and wirelessly take over other drones within wifi distance, creating an army of zombie drones under your control.
Using a Parrot AR.Drone 2, a Raspberry Pi, a USB battery, an Alfa AWUS036H wireless transmitter, aircrack-ng, node-ar-drone, node.js, and my SkyJack software, I developed a drone that flies around, seeks the wireless signal of any other drone in the area, forcefully disconnects the wireless connection of the true owner of the target drone, then authenticates with the target drone pretending to be its owner, then feeds commands to it and all other possessed zombie drones at my will.
The SkyJack software seeks out other Parrot drones wirelessly by their
organizationally unique identifier
An organizationally unique identifier (OUI) is a 24-bit number that uniquely identifies a vendor, manufacturer, or other organization.
OUIs are purchased from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Registration Authority ...
without requiring any previous knowledge of the targeted drones.
The only security currently in the Parrot drones prevents a second pilot from taking over, however SkyJack uses
Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is a network software suite consisting of a detector, packet sniffer, WEP and WPA/ WPA2-PSK cracker and analysis tool for 802.11 wireless LANs. It works with any wireless network interface controller whose driver supports raw mon ...
to perform a "deauthentication attack" against the pilot, exploiting a mechanism in
wireless security
Wireless security is the prevention of unauthorized access or damage to computers or data using wireless networks, which include Wi-Fi networks. The term may also refer to the protection of the wireless network itself from adversaries seeking to ...
. The SkyJack software then takes over the drone as the primary pilot and provides full control and camera access to the SkyJack pilot.
See also
*
Unmanned aerial vehicle
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or unmanned aircraft system (UAS), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft with no human pilot, crew, or passengers onboard, but rather is controlled remotely or is autonomous.De Gruyter Handbook of Dron ...
References
{{reflist, 2
Radio-controlled helicopters
Unmanned helicopters