Self-Protection for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (SP-UAV): Design Overview and Evaluation

Unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) have been receiving high interest lately due to their wide range of potential deployment options that can touch all aspects of our life and economy, such as transportation, delivery, healthcare, surveillance. However, UAVs have also introduced many new vulnerabilities and attack surfaces that can be exploited by cyberattacks. Due to their complexity, autonomous operations, and being relatively new technologies, cyberattacks can be persistent, complex, and can propagate rapidly to severely impact the main UAV functions such as mission management, support, processing operations, maneuver operations, situation awareness. Furthermore, such cyberattacks can also propagate among other UAVs or even their control stations and may even endanger human life. Hence, we need self-protection techniques with an autonomic management approach. In this paper we present our approach to implement self-protection of UAVs (SP-UAV) such that they can continue their critical functions despite cyberattacks targeting UAV operations or services. We present our design approach and implementation using a unified management interface based on three ports: Configuration, observer, and control ports. We have implemented the SP-UAV using C and demonstrated using different attack scenarios how we can apply autonomic responses without human involvement to tolerate cyberattacks against the UAV operations.