Impact of Acoustic Injection Attacks on Micro-UAVs

Popular low-cost micro-Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) rely on inexpensive MEMS sensors to measure instantaneous rotation and acceleration. These sensors are particularly vulnerable to acoustic injection attacks, which can destabilize the UAV and potentially cause a crash. While prior studies demonstrated the severity of such attacks using expensive equipment in controlled environments (e.g., anechoic chambers), their feasibility for opportunistic, low-budget attackers in realistic operational conditions remains unexplored. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate whether a low-budget attacker can disrupt micro-UAVs' operations via inaudible acoustic injection attacks. Our results show that real-world conditions such as UAV mobility and motor-induced frame vibrations substantially increase attack difficulty compared to the ideal scenario, making it particularly challenging for a low-budget attacker to succeed.