Detection and mitigation of actuator attacks on small unmanned aircraft systems

Abstract

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are susceptible to malicious attacks originated by intelligent adversaries, and the actuators constitute one of the critical attack surfaces. In this paper, the problem of detecting and mitigating attacks on the actuators of a small UAS is addressed. Three possible solutions of differing complexity and effectiveness are proposed to address the problem. The first method involves an active detection strategy, whereby carefully designed excitation signals are superimposed on the control commands to increase the detectability of the attack. In the second method, an unknown input observer is designed, which in addition to detecting the attack also estimates the magnitude of the attack. The third method entails designing an actuator system that makes use of variable frequency pulse-width modulated signals to improve the resilience of the actuator against malicious attacks. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is demonstrated using flight experiments and realistic MATLAB simulations that incorporate exogenous disturbances, such as steady winds, atmospheric turbulence, and measurement noise.