Security Challenges of Vehicle Recovery for Urban Air Mobility Contexts

Urban air mobility (UAM) is the set of people, processes and systems transporting passengers and goods in autonomous aircraft over metropolitan areas. This implies important safety and efficiency needs, and big deployment challenges. We will focus in this article on malicious threats in this sensitive environment. For example, an attacker might compromise the onboard systems of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), with catastrophic consequences for passengers and people on the ground. It is hence important to design, implement, deploy, maintain and operate appropriate security mechanisms, to detect threats and mitigate or recover from compromises (e.g. safe emergency landing). This contributes to the high safety and performance requirements for passengers, public and infrastructure. Research around the security challenges for these air mobility operations is a recent topic, and many challenges are still to be resolved. We aim to contribute with a survey of possible attacks, an adversary model, and potential security solutions, along with a preliminary study for vehicle recovery.