English

UAV Resilience Against Stealthy Attacks

Cryptography and Security 2025-04-15 v2

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) depend on untrusted software components to automate dangerous or critical missions, making them a desirable target for attacks. Some work has been done to prevent an attacker who has either compromised a ground control station or parts of a UAV's software from sabotaging the vehicle, but not both. We present an architecture running a UAV software stack with runtime monitoring and seL4-based software isolation that prevents attackers from both exploiting software bugs and stealthy attacks. Our architecture retrofits legacy UAVs and secures the popular MAVLink protocol, making wide adoption possible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.17298,
  title  = {UAV Resilience Against Stealthy Attacks},
  author = {Arthur Amorim and Max Taylor and Trevor Kann and Gary T. Leavens and William L. Harrison and Lance Joneckis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17298},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

To be featured in ICUAS'25 proceedings

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:30:01.194Z