Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms are increasingly deployed in vast low-altitude applications, owing to their capabilities in distributed sensing, flexible communication, and autonomous coordination.
Nevertheless, the open and highly dynamic operating environment of UAV swarms introduces serious security risks, including GPS spoofing, insider threats, and multi-hop intrusion. These threats are aggravated by limited on-board resources, frequently changing network topology, and the presence of intelligent adversaries.
To tackle these issues, this paper proposes a cloud-edge-end collaborative defence framework for UAV swarms. Based on this framework, three complementary mechanisms are developed.
First, a cooperative perception scheme is designed to resist GPS spoofing via interactive attack-defense game modelling.
Second, a behavior-driven authentication method with trust evaluation is developed to mitigate insider threats.
Third, a multi-agent attack forensics framework is devised to intelligently trace the propagation paths of multi-hop attacks in UAV networks. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. Finally, several open research directions are outlined.
Conclusion
This paper has investigated the security challenges and potential solutions for enabling secure collaborative UAV swarms in low-altitude wireless networks.
First, we have introduced a cloud-edge-end collaborative defence architecture to secure UAV swarms. Then, we have reviewed the state of the art, identified three critical security challenges across perception, communication, and network layers, and presented corresponding solutions, including cooperative GPS spoofing defense, dynamic behavioural trust authentication, and multi-agent proactive attack forensics.
Finally, we have outlined several promising research directions, including distributed LLM intelligence, cyber-physical agent collaboration, and privacy-preserving swarm intelligence.
By advancing secure collaborative mechanisms for UAV swarms, this work contributes to building trustworthy and resilient low-altitude wireless networks.
The full research paper can be accessed here.
Source: arXiv