Cybersecurity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles from a Control Systems Perspective: A Review

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely utilized for environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and various defense missions, including reconnaissance and surveillance. Their cybersecurity is essential because any compromise of communication, navigation, or control systems can cause mission failure and introduce significant safety and security risks. Therefore, this paper examines the existing literature on UAV cybersecurity and highlights that most previous surveys focus on listing different types of attacks or communication weaknesses, rather than evaluating the problem from a control systems perspective. Considering control systems is important because the safety and performance of a UAV depend on how cyberattacks affect its sensing, decision-making, and actuation loops; modeling these attacks and their impact on system behavior provides a clearer foundation for designing secure, resilient, and stable control strategies. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature, it presents a mathematical framework for characterizing common cyberattacks on UAV communication and sensing layers, including time-delay switch, false data injection, denial of service, and replay attacks. To demonstrate the impacts of these attacks on UAV control systems, a simulation of a two-UAV leader-follower multi-agent system is conducted in MATLAB. Defense algorithms from the existing literature are then organized into a hierarchical framework of prevention, detection, and mitigation, with detection and mitigation further categorized into model-based, learning-based, and hybrid approaches that combine both. The paper concludes by summarizing key findings and highlighting challenges with current defense strategies, including those insufficiently addressed in existing research.