Source-Derived Cross-Zoom Map-Tile Substitution in UAV Ground Stations: Mission-Planning Propagation and Hierarchical Content Protection

Map imagery provides the visual context that unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operators use to place waypoints. We demonstrate source-derived cross-zoom tile substitution in a QGroundControl configuration retrieving Bing Hybrid imagery over plaintext HTTP. We did not assess whether this transport configuration is used by default or is representative of deployed systems. The induced map displacement followed the predicted cross-level scaling, and the resulting waypoint change propagated through PX4 software-in-the-loop (SITL) mission execution. The proposed protection method checks response authorization, performs geometric source attribution with trusted references, and uses planned mission geometry to decide whether to allow upload. Attribution recovered exact displacement vectors in all 174 held-out cases. All 319 upload decisions in the joint evaluation agreed with the specified policy. The proposed method and registration baselines made identical decisions on the primary benchmark, while the proposed method abstained more often under compression. It classified 51 of 87 subpixel-shift cases as unchanged. When the recorded attribution outcomes were used to evaluate the upload policy, unauthorized, mission-dependent content was blocked; missed shifts were allowed under counterfactual records permitting image responses.