Evaluation of Drone Neutralization Methods using Radio Jamming and Spoofing Techniques

Sammanfattning: The usage of drones is steadily increasing as drones are becoming more available and useful to the general public, but drone usage also leads to problems as for example airports have had to shutdown due to drone sightings. It has become clear that a counter-drone system must be in place to neutralize intruding drones. However, neutralizing a drone is not an easy task, the risk of causing collateral damage and interfering with other radio systems must be highly considered when designing a counter-drone system. In this thesis a set of consumer drones was selected based on market popularity. By studying the wireless communication links of the selected drones a set of drone neutralization methods was identified. For each neutralization method a set of jamming and spoofing techniques was selected from current research. The techniques was used in practise by subjecting the drones to the techniques in a series of drone behaviour experiments. The results was used to evaluate the techniques in four criteria based on avoiding collateral damage, mitigating radio interference, identification requirement and handling multiple intruding drones. The evaluation was then summarized to discuss suitable drone neutralization methods and jamming & spoofing techniques. The results showed that there are neutralization methods that could potentially avoid causing col- lateral damage for certain drones. A full-band barrage jamming technique was shown to best the best performing based on the evaluation criteria, but was also the technique that theoretically induced the most radio interference. Furthermore, drones operating in way-point mode can only be neutralized using a GNSS jamming or spoofing neutralization method. Also using a GPS spoofing neutralization method was shown to be difficult to implement in practise.