UAV Resilience Against Stealthy Attacks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) depend on untrusted software components to automate dangerous or critical missions, making them a desirable target for attacks. Some work has been done to prevent an attacker who has either compromised a ground control station or parts of a UAV's software from sabotaging the vehicle, but not both. We present an architecture running a UAV software stack with runtime monitoring and seL4-based software isolation that prevents attackers from both exploiting software bugs and stealthy attacks. Our architecture retrofits legacy UAVs and secures the popular MAVLink protocol, making wide adoption possible.

@article{amorim2025_2503.17298,
  title={ UAV Resilience Against Stealthy Attacks },
  author={ Arthur Amorim and Max Taylor and Trevor Kann and Gary T. Leavens and William L. Harrison and Lance Joneckis },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17298},
  year={ 2025 }
}