Jamming techniques for protection against drone attack

In the last decade the unmanned aircraft industry has experienced an exponential growth in both the military and civil sectors. Originally developed for military purposes, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are nowadays employed in a wide variety of fields, ranging from delivery services to photography, from agriculture to law enforcement. The commercial availability of UAVs, which can be easily purchased from the Internet at a cost of few hundreds of dollars, has raised new and relevant threats to security and privacy, since this technology can be potentially exploited by malicious parties to carry out illegal acts, such as terrorist attacks or privacy violations. To this purpose, in order to defend against the potential hazard represented by malicious drones, several mitigation techniques, such as GNSS jamming and spoofing, have been developed. The aim of this thesis is to provide a detailed overview of jamming and spoofing techniques and assess the impact of a sweep jammer on the navigation performance of three commercial unmanned aerial vehicles. The effects of the radiofrequency interference (RFI) on the different stages of the GNSS receivers have been tested through the Software NavSAS GNSS receiver (SONG) and for each drone the effective ranges of the jammer under study have been determined.