Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Vulnerability to Cyber Attacks

Abstract

With the increase of technological capabilities of automated systems, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has also increased in many military and civilian applications. UAVs today play an important role in many other areas like wildlife surveys, weather monitoring, monitoring natural disasters affects etc. It is also expected that UAVs will be a major part of future smart cities. The amount and type of information present with UAVs makes it an extremely interesting target for cyber-attacks. However, the cybersecurity aspect of UAVs has not been fully considered while building UAVs. As a result, UAVs are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Potential security vulnerability may exist in the modules, which are responsible for their proper working or may exist during communication between UAVs and control station. Out of these two, communication security is critically important for the success of UAVs as they often carry sensitive information that adversaries might try to get hold of. Wi-Fi attacks such as Eavesdropping, Information Injection, Denial-of-Service, and Distributed DoS are the possible security threats to UAV communications. Recently, GPS spoofing attack, session hijacking, and compromised surveillance are also reported. The goal of this paper is to provide the different levels of vulnerabilities along with the prevention measures required at each level, some major attacks that can be performed on a UAV along with their cause, impact and the precautions required to avoid that attack. It has been observed that the most easily attackable vulnerability on the UAV system is flooding the UAV using the radio communication and the most harmful vulnerability is acquiring complete control through Man-in-the-Middle attack.