Electronic Warfare Cyberattacks, Countermeasures and Modern Defensive Strategies of UAV Avionics: A Survey

TL;DR

The paper addresses the security challenges of UAV avionics under electronic warfare, presenting a taxonomy of cyber threats across UAV-to-UAV coordination, UAV-to-command-center coordination, and UAV functionality attacks. It surveys countermeasures and defensive aids—spanning prevention, detection, and mitigation—while highlighting transponder-based vulnerabilities (e.g., ADS-B, TCAS) and the role of STRIDE in threat modeling. Notable occurrences and civilian-military implications are discussed, with emphasis on minimal on-board resources and the need for lightweight, scalable defenses such as multi-sensor fusion, blockchain-based authentication, and advanced anomaly detection. The work concludes that robust, integrated security strategies are essential for safe, sustainable, and scalable UAV operations, and it outlines practical directions including efficient on-board AI, federated learning, secure data aggregation, and quantum-resistant methods for future deployment.

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a pivotal role in modern autonomous air mobility, and the reliability of UAV avionics systems is critical to ensuring mission success, sustainability practices, and public safety. The success of UAV missions depends on effectively mitigating various aspects of electronic warfare, including non-destructive and destructive cyberattacks, transponder vulnerabilities, and jamming threats, while rigorously implementing countermeasures and defensive aids. This paper provides a comprehensive review of UAV cyberattacks, countermeasures, and defensive strategies. It explores UAV-to-UAV coordination attacks and their associated features, such as dispatch system attacks, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) attacks, Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS)-induced collisions, and TCAS attacks. Additionally, the paper examines UAV-to-command center coordination attacks, as well as UAV functionality attacks. The review also covers various countermeasures and defensive aids designed for UAVs. Lastly, a comparison of common cyberattacks and countermeasure approaches is conducted, along with a discussion of future trends in the field. Keywords: Electronic warfare, UAVs, Avionics Systems, cyberattacks, coordination attacks, functionality attacks, countermeasure, defensive-aids.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Conceptual illustration of UAV electronic warfare: (a) Communication links, (b) common UAV cyberattack classifications, and (c) countermeasures and defensive aids.
• Figure 2: RID Communication Technologies.
• Figure 3: Illustration of TCAS induced collision example and ADS-B spoofing attacks through a ground-based attack, which replays a recorded ADS-B signal, and an aircraft-based attack, which spoofs the aircraft’s ICAO address.
• Figure 4: UAV-to-command center coordination attacks: (a) man-in-the-middle attack; (b) Wi-Fi attack and/or de-authentication attack, wherein a malicious attacker closes the communication channel used by a legitimate user; and (c) Entities involved in a DoS attack.
• Figure 5: GPS spoofing attack.