SSRL-UAVs: A Self-Supervised Deep Representation Learning Approach for GPS Spoofing Attack Detection in Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Self-Supervised Representation Learning (SSRL) has become a potent strategy for addressing the growing threat of Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing to small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) by capturing more abstract and high-level contributing features. This study focuses on enhancing attack detection capabilities by incorporating SSRL techniques. An innovative hybrid architecture integrates Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models to detect attacks on small UAVs alongside two additional architectures, LSTM-Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Deep Neural Network (DNN), for detecting GPS spoofing attacks. The proposed model leverages SSRL, autonomously extracting meaningful features without the need for many labelled instances. Key configurations include LSTM-GRU, with 64 neurons in the input and concatenate layers and 32 neurons in the second layer. Ablation analysis explores various parameter settings, with the model achieving an impressive 99.9% accuracy after 10 epoch iterations, effectively countering GPS spoofing attacks. To further enhance this approach, transfer learning techniques are also incorporated, which help to improve the adaptability and generalisation of the SSRL model. By saving and applying pre-trained weights to a new dataset, we leverage prior knowledge to improve performance. This integration of SSRL and transfer learning yields a validation accuracy of 79.0%, demonstrating enhanced generalisation to new data and reduced training time. The combined approach underscores the robustness and efficiency of GPS spoofing detection in UAVs.