Stealthy navigation spoofing attack for unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper investigates the stealthiness of navigation spoofing attacks against unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The analysis builds on fundamental control-theoretic principles, including the cancellation between system right-half-plane (RHP) poles and the nonminimum-phase zeros of its observer, as well as the intrinsic blocking effect of nonminimum-phase zeros on exponentially divergent signals. Considering the inherent instability of the UAV longitudinal dynamics and the commonly used Kalman-filter-based χ2 anomaly detector, we design the attack injection direction and the time-varying structure of the attack signal according to the nonminimum-phase zeros induced by the RHP poles of the longitudinal motion model. Rigorous theoretical analysis shows that the constructed attack is perfectly stealthy with respect to the χ2 detector, while simultaneously driving the UAV’s longitudinal motion to deviate severely from its nominal trajectory. Finally, simulation results based on an Aerosonde UAV validate the stealthiness and effectiveness of the proposed navigation spoofing strategy.