Survey of security protocols and vulnerabilities in unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

With the rapid growth in technology, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have increased in civil and military applications including rescue operations, disaster recovery, and military operations. Despite the utility and advantages of UAVs, they may lead to major security breaches in the context of hardware, software, and communication channel, due their ease of use and availability. UAVs are vulnerable to various types of attacks such as spoofing, false data injection, jamming, fuzzing, availability, confidentiality, and integrity attacks. To overcome these security threats, researchers have been investigating strong security protocols to keep UAVs safe from the attackers. Nevertheless, there are many flaws in the developed protocols which can be exploited by hackers. Therefore, it is becomes crucial to study and analyze the existing security protocols used in UAVs to discover and address their vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The purpose of this study is to explore the vulnerabilities in the security protocols and propose guidelines to improve the security and provide future research directions.