Mavlink

The Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol presents no authentication mechanism on its version 1.0 (nor authorization) whichs leads to a variety of attacks including identity spoofing, unauthorized access, PITM attacks and more. According to literature, version 2.0 optionally allows for package signing which mitigates this flaw. Another source mentions that MAVLink 2.0 only provides a simple authentication system based on HMAC. This implies that the flying system overall should add the same symmetric key into all devices of network. If not the case, this may cause a security issue, that if one of the devices and its symmetric key are compromised, the whole authentication system is not reliable.

Published: 2020-07-03T14:30:15.587Z
Updated: 2024-09-16T17:22:38.711Z

This vulnerability applies to the Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol and allows a remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information provided it has access to the communication medium. MAVLink is a header-based protocol that does not perform encryption to improve transfer (and reception speed) and efficiency by design. The increasing popularity of the protocol (used accross different autopilots) has led to its use in wired and wireless mediums through insecure communication channels exposing sensitive information to a remote attacker with ability to intercept network traffic.

Published: 2020-07-03T14:30:11.491Z
Updated: 2024-09-16T20:37:09.108Z