Un-Rocking Drones: Foundations of Acoustic Injection Attacks and Recovery Thereof

—Drones equipped with microelectromechanical sys-tem (MEMS) inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors are exposed to acoustic injection attacks. These attacks resonate sensors, compromising their output and causing drones to crash. Several mitigation strategies have been proposed; however, they are limited in terms of practicality as they cannot make the drone fly t o its planned destination in the event of an attack. To remedy this, we aim at recovering the compromised sensor values for the practical mitigation of acoustic injection attacks. To achieve this, we first c onstructed a r ealistic testbed and delved into the implications of resonant MEMS sensors on drones. We discovered that sampling jitter, which refers to the inconsistent timing delay in retrieving sensor values, has a significant i m pact o n d r one c r ashes d u ring t h e a t tack. Note that while any real-time system needs to satisfy its real-time

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.14722/ndss.2023.24112
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• CMGAN: Conformer-Based Metric-GAN for Monaural Speech Enhancement

  2022cited by this paper
• SoK: Security and Privacy in the Age of Commercial Drones

  2021cited by this paper
• Toward Robust Fault Identification of Complex Industrial Processes Using Stacked Sparse-Denoising Autoencoder With Softmax Classifier

  2021cited by this paper
• Robust Feature Extraction for Geochemical Anomaly Recognition Using a Stacked Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder

  2021cited by this paper
• Investigation of Timing Behavior and Jitter in a Smart Inertial Sensor Debugging Architecture

  2021cited by this paper
• Hacking a Commercial Drone with Open-Source Software: Exploring Data Privacy Violations

  2021cited by this paper
• SoK: A Minimalist Approach to Formalizing Analog Sensor Security

  2020cited by this paper
• From Control Model to Program: Investigating Robotic Aerial Vehicle Accidents with MAYDAY

  2020cited by this paper
• A Design Methodology of Digital Control System for MEMS Gyroscope Based on Multi-Objective Parameter Optimization

  2020cited by this paper
• Deep-Learning Tracking for Autonomous Flying Systems Under Adversarial Inputs

  2020cited by this paper
• Listening to Sounds of Silence for Speech Denoising

  2020cited by this paper
• Software-based Realtime Recovery from Sensor Attacks on Robotic Vehicles

  2020influential reference
• SAVIOR: Securing Autonomous Vehicles with Robust Physical Invariants

  2020cited by this paper
• Quadrotor Drone System Identification via Model-Based Design and In-Flight Sine Wave Injections

  2020cited by this paper
• Optimizing Deep Learning Inference on Embedded Systems Through Adaptive Model Selection

  2019cited by this paper
• Radar Signal Intra-Pulse Modulation Recognition Based on Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder and Deep Convolutional Neural Network

  2019cited by this paper
• Real-time Indoor Navigation of UAV Based on Visual Delay Compensation

  2019cited by this paper
• System Identification and Controller Optimization of Coaxial Quadrotor UAV in Hover

  2019cited by this paper
• System Identification of a Small UAS in Support of Handling Qualities Evaluations

  2019cited by this paper
• Vulnerability of MEMS Gyroscopes to Targeted Acoustic Attacks

  2019influential reference
• RVFuzzer: Finding Input Validation Bugs in Robotic Vehicles through Control-Guided Testing

  2019cited by this paper
• Improving Robustness of Medical Image Diagnosis with Denoising Convolutional Neural Networks

  2019cited by this paper
• Injected and Delivered: Fabricating Implicit Control over Actuation Systems by Spoofing Inertial Sensors

  2018influential reference
• Speech Denoising with Deep Feature Losses

  2018cited by this paper
• Detecting Attacks Against Robotic Vehicles: A Control Invariant Approach

  2018cited by this paper
• Flight Recovery of MAVs with Compromised IMU

  2018cited by this paper
• A Robust System for Noisy Image Classification Combining Denoising Autoencoder and Convolutional Neural Network

  2018cited by this paper
• Security Vulnerabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Countermeasures: An Experimental Study

  2018cited by this paper
• Illusion and Dazzle: Adversarial Optical Channel Exploits Against Lidars for Automotive Applications

  2017cited by this paper
• Understanding Security Threats in Consumer Drones Through the Lens of the Discovery Quadcopter Family

  2017cited by this paper
• WALNUT: Waging Doubt on the Integrity of MEMS Accelerometers with Acoustic Injection Attacks

  2017influential reference
• Sensor Calibration and Measurement Model

  2017cited by this paper
• System Identification and Controller Optimization of a Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in Hover

  2017cited by this paper
• Attack-Resilient Sensor Fusion for Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems

  2016cited by this paper
• A distributed MEMS gyro network for joint velocity estimation

  2016cited by this paper
• Perception Optimized Deep Denoising AutoEncoders for Speech Enhancement

  2016cited by this paper
• Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Deep Learning Software Tools

  2016cited by this paper
• A high fidelity simulator for a quadrotor UAV using ROS and Gazebo

  2015cited by this paper
• Rocking Drones with Intentional Sound Noise on Gyroscopic Sensors

  2015influential reference
• Sensor attack detection in the presence of transient faults

  2015cited by this paper
• Delay Compensation of Tilt Sensors Based on MEMS Accelerometer Using Data Fusion Technique

  2015cited by this paper
• Gazebo

  2014cited by this paper
• Mathematical Modelling and Parameter Identification of Quadrotor (a survey)

  2014cited by this paper
• Attack-resilient sensor fusion

  2014cited by this paper
• Consistent Wiener Filtering for Audio Source Separation

  2013cited by this paper
• Speech enhancement based on deep denoising autoencoder

  2013cited by this paper
• What Is a Savitzky-Golay Filter? [Lecture Notes]

  2011cited by this paper
• Temperature Effects on the Performance and Reliability of MEMS Gyroscope Sensors

  2009cited by this paper
• Sonic Nirvana : Using MEMS Accelerometers as Acoustic Pickups in Musical Instruments

  2009cited by this paper
• Environmentally Robust MEMS Vibratory Gyroscopes for Automotive Applications

  2009cited by this paper
• Extracting and composing robust features with denoising autoencoders

  2008cited by this paper
• Effects of Operational Frequency Scaling in Multi-Degree of Freedom MEMS Gyroscopes

  2008cited by this paper
• Modeling and Hardware-inthe-Loop Simulation for a Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

  2007cited by this paper
• Performance Comparison of VxWorks, Linux, RTAI, and Xenomai in a Hard Real-Time Application

  2007cited by this paper
• Review of hardware-in-the-loop simulation and its prospects in the automotive area

  2006cited by this paper
• A Mathematical Theory of Communication

  2006cited by this paper
• A control scheme for a MEMS electrostatic resonant gyroscope excited using combined parametric excitation and harmonic forcing

  2006cited by this paper
• On hardware-in-the-loop simulation

  2005cited by this paper
• An approach for increasing drive-mode bandwidth of MEMS vibratory gyroscopes

  2005cited by this paper
• Inherently robust micromachined gyroscopes with 2-DOF sense-mode oscillator

  2005cited by this paper
• Design and use paradigms for Gazebo, an open-source multi-robot simulator

  2004cited by this paper
• Jitter effect on digital downconversion receiver with undersampling scheme

  2004cited by this paper
• Nonresonant micromachined gyroscopes with structural mode-decoupling

  2003cited by this paper
• Performance Analysis of VxWorks and RTLinux

  2001cited by this paper
• Real-time operating system timing jitter and its impact on motor control

  2001cited by this paper
• Directed energy weapons

  2001cited by this paper
• Introduction To "Communication In The Presence Of Noise"

  1998cited by this paper
• Theory and application of digital signal processing

  1975cited by this paper
• What Is a Savitzky-Golay Filter?

  year unknowncited by this paper

• Dynamic Real-time Learning of Electromagnetic Interference Parameters for Drone Crashing Attack

  2025cites this paper
• IMUFuzzer: Resilience-based Discovery of Signal Injection Attacks on Robotic Aerial Vehicles

  2025influential citation
• Ripple: Software-Only Detection of Signal Injection Attacks in Drone Temperature Sensors

  2025cites this paper
• SoundBoost: Effective RCA and Attack Detection for UAV via Acoustic Side-Channel

  2025cites this paper
• RAVAGE: Robotic Autonomous Vehicles’ Attack Generation Engine

  2025cites this paper
• SoK: Understanding the Fundamentals and Implications of Sensor Out-of-band Vulnerabilities

  2025cites this paper
• SoK: Cybersecurity Assessment of Humanoid Ecosystem

  2025cites this paper
• SoK: How Sensor Attacks Disrupt Autonomous Vehicles: An End-to-end Analysis, Challenges, and Missed Threats

  2025cites this paper
• Impact of Acoustic Injection Attacks on Micro-UAVs

  2025influential citation
• Siren Song: Acoustic Attacks on Pose Estimation in XR Headsets

  2025cites this paper
• Unfolding Challenges in Securing and Regulating Unmanned Air Vehicles

  2025cites this paper
• When the Base Station Flies: Rethinking Security for UAV-Based 6G Networks

  2025cites this paper
• RobIn: Robust-Invariant-Based Physical Attack Detector for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles

  2025influential citation
• Gyro-Mag: Attack-Resilient System Based on Sensor Estimation

  2025cites this paper
• Software Availability Protection in Cyber-Physical Systems

  2025cites this paper
• MARS: Defending Unmanned Aerial Vehicles From Attacks on Inertial Sensors with Model-based Anomaly Detection and Recovery

  2025influential citation
• A Systematic Study of Physical Sensor Attack Hardness

  2024influential citation
• Sensor Data Transplantation for Redundant Hardware Switchover in Micro Autonomous Vehicles

  2024cites this paper
• SpecGuard: Specification Aware Recovery for Robotic Autonomous Vehicles from Physical Attacks

  2024influential citation
• Enhancing the MEMS Gyroscope Physical Assurance Using Quantum Sensing

  2024cites this paper
• ROS2-Based Simulation Framework for Cyberphysical Security Analysis of UAVs

  2024cites this paper
• Sensor Deprivation Attacks for Stealthy UAV Manipulation

  2024cites this paper
• Real-time Rectifying Flight Control Misconfiguration Using Intelligent Agent

  2024cites this paper
• Sensor attack online classification for UAVs using machine learning

  2024cites this paper
• Cyber-Physical Fuzzing Framework for Extracting Butterfly Effect in UAV Systems

  2024cites this paper
• VIMU: Effective Physics-based Realtime Detection and Recovery against Stealthy Attacks on UAVs

  2024influential citation
• SCVMON: Data-oriented attack recovery for RVs based on safety-critical variable monitoring

  2023cites this paper
• SEBD: Sensor Emulation Based Backdoor for Autopilot

  2023cites this paper
• The Heat is On: Understanding and Mitigating Vulnerabilities of Thermal Image Perception in Autonomous Systems

  year unknowncites this paper