Detection and Mitigation of Cyber Attacks on UAV Networks

The topic of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) cybersecurity has received significant recent interest from the research community, with many methods proposed in the literature to improve detect and mitigate various types of attacks. This paper provides a comprehensive review of UAV cybersecurity, addressing all aspects of the UAV ecosystem and presenting a thorough review of the various types of UAV attacks, including a survey of recent real-world UAV cybersecurity incidents. UAV cybersecurity threat analysis and risk assessment methodologies are reviewed, discussing how potential attacks translate to UAV system risk. The various threat detection and countermeasure (mitigation) techniques are analyzed. Finally, this paper’s unique contribution is that it provides a survey of existing tools and datasets that are available to UAV cybersecurity researchers. A key identified research gap is the need to conduct real-world experimentation to validate proposed cybersecurity techniques. Many proposed approaches are computationally expensive or require additional redundant hardware onboard the UAV. Future research should focus on the development of lightweight methods that are practical for UAV adoption. Another key research gap is the relative lack of RemoteID cybersecurity research, despite its mandated adoption by UAVs. Lastly, this paper concludes that Global Positioning System (GPS)-related threats pose the greatest continued risk to UAVs.