Cyber-Physical Attack Threats Analysis for UAVs from CPS Perspective

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely adopted in military and civilian areas. However, security problems of UAVs are also gradually exposed and attracted great attention. As an integration of computation, control and communication components, UAVs could be considered as a typical Cyber Physical System (CPS). Therefore, the security threats coming from cyber-attack will affect the safety performance of UAVs, that is, cyber security threats could spread to physical domain. Aiming at the type of “cyber-physical attack”, this paper analyzes its main threats to UAVs from a CPS perspective. Based on analyzing CPS architecture of UAVs, the cyber-physical threats are clarified from attacks on sensors, computation/control, communication components respectively. As the preliminary work for analyzing cross-domain security risk propagation mechanism of UAVs, the spread process of the threats from cyber domain to physical domain was analyzed, which is also of reference significance for analyzing other CPS.