Executive brief
Parrot AR.Drone is a consumer quadcopter drone controlled wirelessly via Wi-Fi. An attacker within radio range can forge Wi-Fi deauthentication frames to forcibly disconnect the controller from the drone's network, causing loss of control and video feed while the drone is in flight. This could result in a crash, property damage, or injury.
Technical details
This vulnerability exploits the unauthenticated nature of IEEE 802.11 management frames. The AR.Drone exposes an open Wi-Fi access point that the controller associates with; because 802.11 deauthentication frames lack cryptographic protection, any attacker within radio range can forge these frames to drop the controller's association. The attack vector is adjacent (radio range only), requires no authentication to the drone, and results in immediate loss of command and telemetry channels. An attacker can reliably trigger crashes or force-land the aircraft during operation. No vendor patch has been released for these legacy products.
Affected products
- Parrot AR.Drone 1 all
- Parrot AR.Drone 2 all
Timeline
- 2021: disclosed: Vulnerability reported and documented
- 2022-03-18: advisory: CVE-2021-44319 assigned by MITRE