An Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle Attack Scenario and Trustworthy Repair Architecture

Abstract

With the growing ubiquity of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), mitigating emergent threats in such systems has become increasingly important. In this short paper, we discuss an indicative class of UAVs and a potential attack scenario in which a benign UAV completing a mission can be compromised by a malicious attacker with an antenna and a commodity computer with open-source ground station software. We attest to the relevance of such a scenario for both enterprise and defense applications. We describe a system architecture for resiliency and trustworthiness in the face of these attacks. Our system is based on the quantitative assessment of trust from domain-specific telemetry data and the application of program repair techniques to UAV flight plans. We conclude with a discussion of restoring trust in post-repair UAV mission integrity.