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Scott holding the DJI Tello Drone
Inspiration
One of our members is a certified drone operator under part 107 who has seen a lack of out-of-the-box security. This is concerning because if the pilot loses control of the drone they are liable for damages or injuries the drone may cause. Consumers using drones without taking the extra steps of adding authentication are a security risk for their organizations, networks, or personal privacy. We wanted to explore truly how vulnerable these certain drones were.
What it does
TellOvertake uses wireless enumeration to gather all the drones in an area and allows the attacker to select a drone to control. Once connected to the drone, we can see the video feed of the drone, cutting the original owner's video feed off to a black screen on the Tello app. From there, we can control the drone using either a keyboard or an Xbox controller. At this point, we practically have full control of the drone and can do whatever we want with it including some flips!
How we built it
We built our project using exclusively Python and various Python libraries such as pygame and DJITelloPy. To manage our codebase we used GitHub and created our code in VSCode. We organized our files into command/control files, and networking files to complete the hack.
Challenges we ran into
One of the main challenges we ran into with this project was time. We had features we wanted to include such as WPA-2-Personal password cracking and being able to switch between control of multiple drones. However, we prioritized having a working demonstration and could not completely implement features such as these.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Overall we are extremely proud of getting our project to the point it's at within 24 hours. We are also proud of getting our control system to work with both the controller and keyboard. Understanding Windows networking in Python was another accomplishment we are proud of as well.
What we learned
All of us had varying skill sets coming into this project, however, we all learned something useful. Across our team we learned Windows CLI networking, how to interact with hardware, Python and various libraries, and many more things too.
What's next for TellOvertake
In the future, we want to enable more offensive capabilities as well as being able to hack into password-secured drones to have more stable and permanent control over the drone.
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