How Cyber-Resilient Are Unmanned Aircraft Systems? A Systematic Meta-Review

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) offer a promising future for aviation operations, even though it suffers larger cyber-related challenges. As such, cyber-resilience becomes a core property for drones’ operations. This paper presents a systematic meta-review of the scientific literature on Unmanned Aircraft Systems cyber-resilience, starting from 28 literature reviews and surveys in the field. This study examines three areas: the typologies of cyber threats being investigated, the cyber-resilience aspects and functions, and how proposed mitigation strategies align with and support these resilience functions. Overall, 69 cyber threats were identified, where Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing and jamming were the most frequent ones, underscoring the vulnerability of GPS-based navigation systems in UAS. In terms of cyber-resilience functions, the largest focus remains on the identification, protection, and detection of cyber threats, while limited attention emerges to incident handling and post-event recovery. This is confirmed by the higher frequency of preventive, rather than recovery-oriented, mitigation strategies. Overall, the findings point towards a still limited cyber-resilience implementation for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, witnessing the need for more systemic efforts to guarantee truly resilient UAS operations.