Automotive and Drone Cybersecurity: Penetration Testing CAN Bus, ECU Firmware, UAV Protocols

The CAN bus has no authentication. Most ECUs ship with debug ports open. Commercial drones broadcast telemetry in cleartext and accept commands from any transmitter in range. This book shows you how to find, demonstrate, and document every one of those vulnerabilities - on real tools, in a real lab, against real protocols. This is the practitioner's guide that bridges automotive CAN and ECU security with UAV protocol exploitation in a single, hands-on workflow. Where existing resources are dated, too theoretical, or cover only one domain, this book teaches the complete attack chain: passive CAN capture, UDS diagnostic exploitation, ECU firmware extraction and reverse engineering, GPS spoofing, MAVLink command injection, and ISO/SAE 21434-aligned reporting - with working code in every chapter. - Configure a virtual CAN lab on Linux without hardware and practice all injection techniques safely - Decode and reverse-engineer unknown CAN traffic and DBC signal definitions from raw captures - Execute CAN injection, flooding, Bus-Off, spoofing, and fuzzing attacks against simulated targets - Extract ECU firmware via JTAG, SWD, and UDS diagnostic programming sessions - Reverse-engineer seed-key algorithms from firmware binaries using Ghidra and achieve Security Access bypass - Intercept MAVLink v1 telemetry and inject commands into unauthenticated drone control links - Build a GPS L1 spoofer with HackRF and GPS-SDR-SIM and divert a drone's navigation in a lab environment - Perform DJI firmware extraction, geofencing bypass, and data link man-in-the-middle interception - Produce a TARA-aligned penetration test report using ISO/SAE 21434 findings format that automotive engineering teams can act on >The VCAT (Vehicle and Craft Attack Taxonomy) framework organizes every chapter into a five-phase assessment workflow: Passive Reconnaissance, Diagnostic Enumeration, Firmware Analysis, Active Exploitation, and TARA-Aligned Reporting. Ten chapters progress from foundational protocol knowledge through complete attack chains for both vehicle and drone platforms, with full working Python code, CLI toolchain commands, and lab exercises in every section. For penetration testers, automotive security engineers, embedded developers, and red teamers moving into automotive or UAV security domains. Pick it up and run the first attack before the end of Chapter 4.

Pages: 215, Paperback, Independently published