Security Threats and Mitigation Techniques in UAV Communications: A Comprehensive Survey

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been instrumental in enabling many new applications and services, including military and rescue operations, aerial surveillance, civilian applications, precision farming, as well as providing extensive wireless network access in remote areas. They have also been used in other areas such as transmission line and oil rig monitoring, disaster recovery, etc. With their increasing payload ability and flight duration, using UAVs is a preferred choice for a multitude of upcoming wireless communication systems. However, because of their open operational nature, UAVs are highly vulnerable to severe security breaches via cyber attacks, eavesdropping on navigational and communication links, etc. Given their widespread applications, the requirement of secured UAV communications has become more and more critical since security failures can lead to detrimental consequences. Several works have examined the extent of privacy and security issues in UAV-assisted networks and introduced various mitigation techniques to address different security challenges. In this paper, a comprehensive survey is conducted that centers on the security issues related to UAV-aided networks. A descriptive taxonomy of various security intrusions on the UAV networks and commonly-used secrecy performance metrics are thoroughly reviewed. An in-depth discussion is provided on alleviating threats with proactive security techniques blended with key wireless communication technologies such as mmWave, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), and cognitive radio. Moreover, several emerging topics like machine learning, software-defined networks, fog and edge computing, blockchain, are discussed in the context of UAV-aided secure communications.