SonicNudge: Controlled Displacement of Hovering UAVs via Estimator-Controller Coupling

Abstract

UAV displacement attacks have traditionally relied on spoofing sensors that directly report position or translational motion, such as GNSS and optical flow. In this work, we introduce SonicNudge, a new attack primitive that instead targets the gyroscope and shows that low-level inertial errors can be transformed into controlled displacement of hovering or slow-moving UAVs. The attack exploits estimator--controller coupling: a small gyroscope perturbation by ultrasonic resonance can persist as an attitude-estimation bias, and the flight controller can convert this biased estimate into a shifted hover point. This behavior is especially relevant to UAV tasks that require hovering, station-keeping, slow approach, or precise final alignment, such as perimeter denial, inspection, docking, landing alignment, and close-proximity operation, where meter-scale position errors can be operationally meaningful. We analyze this attack primitive in a PX4-style flight stack and validate it through 81 simulation runs and more than 10 indoor/outdoor physical experiments, showing that displacement is governed by estimator weighting, bias observability, and closed-loop position correction. Our study suggests that UAV and vehicle-system security should look beyond direct navigation spoofing and pay closer attention to low-level inertial errors and estimator--controller coupling as a subtle but important attack surface.