Detection of UAV GPS Spoofing Attacks Using a Stacked Ensemble Method

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are vulnerable to global positioning system (GPS) spoofing attacks, which can mislead their navigation systems and result in unpredictable catastrophic consequences. To address this issue, we propose a detection method based on stacked ensemble learning that combines convolutional neural network (CNN) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) to detect spoofing signals in the GPS data received by UAVs. First, we applied the synthetic minority oversampling (SMOTE) technique to the dataset to address the issue of class imbalance. Then, we used a CNN model to extract high-level features, combined with the original features as input for the stacked model. The stacked model employs XGBoost as the base learner, which is optimized through five-fold cross-validation, and utilizes logistic regression for the final prediction. Furthermore, we incorporated magnetic field data to enhance the system’s robustness, thereby further improving the accuracy and reliability of GPS spoofing attack detection. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model achieved a high accuracy of 99.79% in detecting GPS spoofing attacks, demonstrating its potential effectiveness in enhancing UAV security.