A Survey of Security Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Air Mobility and eVTOL Aircraft
Abstract
This survey reviews the existing and envisioned security vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms relevant to Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems, with a focus on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Drawing from vulnerabilities in the avionics in commercial aviation and the automated unmanned aerial systems (UAS), the paper presents a taxonomy of attacks, analyzes mitigation strategies, and proposes a secure system architecture tailored to the future AAM ecosystem. The paper also highlights key threat vectors, including Global Positioning System (GPS) jamming/spoofing, ATC radio frequency misuse, attacks on TCAS and ADS-B, possible backdoor via Electronic Flight Bag (EFB), new vulnerabilities introduced by aircraft automation and connectivity, and risks from flight management system (FMS) software, database and cloud services. Finally, this paper describes emerging defense techniques against these attacks, and open technical problems to address toward better defense mechanisms.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.14415,
title = {A Survey of Security Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Air Mobility and eVTOL Aircraft},
author = {Mahyar Ghazanfari and Iman Sharifi and Peng Wei and Noah Dahle and Abel Diaz Gonzalez and Austin Coursey and Bryce Bjorkman and Cailani Lemieux-Mack and Robert Canady and Abenezer Taye and Bryan C. Ward and Xenofon Koutsoukos and Gautam Biswas and Maheed H. Ahmed and Hyeong Tae Kim and Mahsa Ghasemi and Vijay Gupta and Filippos Fotiadis and Ufuk Topcu and Junchi Lu and Alfred Chen and Abdul Kareem Ras and Nischal Aryal and Amer Ibrahim and Amir Shirkhodaie and Heber Herencia-Zapana and Saqib Hasan and Isaac Amundson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.14415},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
28 pages, 4 figures, 11 tables