Analysis and Design of Stealthy Cyber Attacks on Unmanned Aerial Systems

Cyber security has emerged as one of the most important issues in unmanned aerial systems for which the functionality heavily relies on onboard automation and intervehicle communications. In this paper, potential cyber threats and vulnerabilities in the unmanned aerial system’s state estimator to stealthy cyber attacks are identified, which can avoid being detected by the monitoring system. Specifically, this paper investigates the worst stealthy cyber attack that can maximize the state estimation error of the unmanned aerial system’s state estimator while not being detected. First, the condition that the system is vulnerable to the stealthy cyber attacks is derived, and then an analytical method is provided to identify the worst stealthy cyber attack. The proposed cyber attack analysis methods are demonstrated with illustrative examples of an onboard unmanned aerial system navigation system and an unmanned aerial system tracking application.