A Simulation Testbed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network Cyber Attack Analysis

Advances in technology for miniature electronic military equipment and systems have led to the emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as the new weapons of war and tools used in various other areas. UAVs can easily be controlled from a remote location. They are being used for critical operations, including offensive, reconnaissance, surveillance and other civilian missions. The need to secure these channels in a UAV system is one of the most important aspects of the security of this system because all information critical to the mission is sent through wireless communication channels. It is well understood that loss of control over these systems to adversaries due to the lack of security is a potential threat to national security. Therefore, it is important to understand the impact of various attack attempts on the UAV system and develop effective approaches to secure it. The most cost-effective and insightful way to do this is to simulate various operational scenarios of UAVs in advance. In this work, we introduce UAVSim, a simulation testbed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks cyber security analysis. The testbed allows users to easily experiment by adjusting different parameters for the UAV networks, hosts and attacks. In addition, each UAV host works on welldefined mobility framework and radio propagation models, which resembles real-world scenarios. Based on the experiments performed in UAVSim, we evaluate the impact of DDoS and Jamming attacks against UAV networks and report the results to demonstrate the necessity and usefulness of the testbed.