Glitch in the Sky: Exploiting Voltage Fault Injection in UAV Flight Controllers

TL;DR

This paper examines how voltage glitch fault injection can compromise UAV autopilot safety mechanisms, revealing timing-sensitive vulnerabilities that could enable hijacking.

Contribution

It introduces a dual evaluation method combining software simulation and hardware experiments to identify vulnerabilities in UAV fail-safe logic.

Findings

Voltage glitches can disable emergency failsafe responses.

Simulated faults match real hardware vulnerabilities.

Timing-sensitive faults pose significant security risks.

Abstract

As Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) become increasingly pervasive and autonomous, ensuring the resilience of their embedded logic is critical to maintaining safety and integrity. Among the most stealthy and damaging threats are non-invasive fault injection attacks, where hardware-level disturbances propagate into software execution and compromise control logic. In this paper, we investigate the susceptibility of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) autopilot fail-safe mechanisms to voltage glitch fault injection. We introduce a dual evaluation approach: software-based fault simulation using ARMORY and hardware-based experiments with a voltage glitching platform (Chip-Whisperer), applying controlled and timely faults to an STM32 microcontroller running UAV-Autopilot fail-safe logic. Our targeted analysis of specific fail-safe modes uncovers timing-sensitive vulnerabilities that can suppress or alter safety responses, such as disabling emergency failsafe activation at critical moments, potentially enabling UAV hijacking. Furthermore, we validate software-based fault injection results against real hardware behavior, demonstrating how simulated attacks translate into tangible risks for CPS security and reliability.