Cybersecurity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are unmanned aircrafts operated by radio remote control and programmed control equipment. Due to their small size, low cost, and high flexibility, UAVs are widely used in military and civilian fields, such as geological detection, film shooting, traffic control, homeland security, and reconnaissance in battlefield. With the rapid increase of UAVs and the success of their related technologies, they also face many security problems, such as jamming, man-in-the-middle, and false message injection attacks. The security of UAVs has become a hot research topic. However, most UAV-related surveys are analyzed and summarized from a single perspective, there are few surveys about UAV cybersecurity. Hence, we believe that a categorized and comprehensive survey of UAV cybersecurity is urgently needed. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on UAV cybersecurity, from three aspects of the physical domain, cyber domain, and cyber-physical domain. Specifically, in the physical domain, we review attacks that directly affect UAVs' fuselages or their significant components and discuss the solutions to these attacks. We survey the cyber threats against UAVs and the corresponding defense or detection methods in the cyber domain. One highlight is the security threat for UAV intelligent systems and the corresponding defense methods. Finally, in the cyberphysical domain, we summarize cyber-physical attacks such as GPS spoofing, these attacks are easy to destroy the chips and sensors of UAVs. In conclusion, understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help pave a path towards the cybersecurity of UAVs. In addition, future research directions and problems to be solved are discussed at the end of this survey. With this comprehensive literature review, we set out to provide a novel insight into the current state of cybersecurity of UAVs.