Threat Analysis of a Long Range Autonomous Unmanned Aerial System

Technology of the 21st century has led to the development and deployment of many unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) within today's airspace. UAVs typically perform tasks such as surveillance, pipeline, and crop monitoring, professional imaging, surveying, search and rescue, and military operations. Many of these UAVs execute their duties entirely autonomously without the intervention of humans. Due to the nature of the responsibilities of UAVs, their security is of utmost importance. Security threats to UAVs are often targeted at the unmanned aerial system (UAS) which includes everything employed to allow the UAV to function; this can include the software running on the drone, the control system piloting the drone and the connection between the two. This paper provides an overview of autonomous UAS architecture and analyzes security threats to the system. The goal of this paper is to support UAV manufacturers and developers to have an understanding of the components required in an autonomous UAS and allow them to identify, prevent and address security concerns within their systems.