Countering Cybersecurity Threats Against Unmanned Vehicle Systems

Cranfield University researchers have developed a monitoring system whose purpose is to monitor mission profile implementation at both high level mission execution and at lower level software code operation to tackle specific threats of malicious code and possible spurious commands received over a vehicle's data links.

As the use of UASs and UAVs increase in the modern battlefield, the need to secure these weapon platforms is of increasing importance as any flaw could have catastrophic results. To this end much work has been carried out recently to first understand the avenues through which a cyber-attack could come and then how to react when measures meant to protect against it have failed.

One expert breaks down the avenues of attack into ten different categories, from which four stand out: GPS jamming, malware, erroneous data transmissions, and application code manipulation. The significance of these avenues of attack is that they target the vehicle itself in a direct manner.