UAV’s applications, architecture, security issues and attack scenarios: A survey

Khan, Navid Ali; Brohi, Sarfraz; Jhanjhi, NZ

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)/drones have become very popular in recent years as they are widely used in several domains. They are widely used in both military and civilian applications such as aerial photography, entertainment, search and rescue missions, reconnaissance, traffic monitoring, and logistics. Typically, UAVs are operated from a controller or a ground control station (GCS) with the help of different communication protocols such as MAVLink, UranusLink, UAVCAN. These communication protocols are used to exchange messages. The messages contain considerable information about the UAV and certain control commands sent from GCS to UAV or UAV to GCS. Though these protocols provide better communication along with secure aspects, however, mostly there is no subtle mechanism for securing these messages and are prone to many security attacks such as man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, denial-of-services (DoS) attack, packet data injection attack, and eavesdropping. This can result in serious consequences, for instance, crash land of a military or civilian UAV, steal important data of a military operation, false injection of reports in a reconnaissance or search and rescue operation, and many more. So, there is a need for a secure communication protocol which can ensure the required security standard sets for communication of UAVs. This survey presents the applications, general architecture, attacks on UAVs, and an insight into the security issues of UAV’s communication protocols and proposes a new secure communication protocol for the stated issues of UAVs.

• Online Publication Date: Nov 18, 2021
• Publication Date: 2020
• Deposit Date: Sep 9, 2022
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 753-760
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems book series (LNNS,volume 118)
• Series ISSN: 2367-3389
• Book Title: Book cover Book cover Intelligent Computing and Innovation on Data Science
• ISBN: 9789811532832; 9789811532849
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3284-9_81
• Keywords: UAV's, Drones, Security, Communication protocols
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9941037
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-3284-9_81
• Related Public URLs: https://www.springer.com/series/15179