FPCA: Parasitic Coding Authentication for UAVs by FM Signals

De-authentication attack is one of the major threats to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication, in which the attacker continuously sends de-authentication frames to disconnect the UAV communication link. Existing defense methods are based on authentication by digital passwords or physical channel features. But they suffer from replay attacks or cannot adapt to the UAV mobility. In this paper, instead of enhancing the in-channel authentication, we leverage the ambient broadcasting signal to establish a low-cost additional channel for authentication. Different from methods using another dedicated secure communication channel to perform an independent authentication, we use the ambient FM radio broadcasting channel and couple the two channels by encoding parasitic bits on the host signals of the broadcasting channel, which is called parasitic coding. To further enhance the security, we propose the FM-based Parasitic Coding Authentication (FPCA) that leverages elaborate host signal processing and vector coding to ensure that the attacker cannot decode our authentication even knowing the FM receiving frequency. We implement FPCA on the embedded UAV platform. The extensive experiments show that FPCA can resist replay attacks and brute force searching, achieving reliable continuous authentication for UAVs.