1. Assigning critical missions to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has the potential to expose them to cyber threats, including disruptions to command and control links or the use of UAVs for kinetic attacks. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure the security of electronic and communications systems in multi-UAV networks for their safe integration into military and civilian airspaces. While researchers have produced many studies and proposals for attacks and mitigation techniques in UAV networks, the current focus on modeling these networks as typical mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and isolated systems has resulted in overlooking vulnerabilities specific to UAVs and their cyber-physical aspects. This paper aims to highlight critical challenges associated with securing UAV networks against attacks targeting these vulnerabilities.
2. We study In multihop ad hoc networks, a jammer can drastically disrupt the flow of information by intentionally interfering with links between a subset of nodes. The impact of such attacks can escalate when the jammer is moving. As a countermeasure for such attacks, adaptive beam-forming techniques can be employed for spatial filtering of the jamming signal. This paper investigates the performance of adaptive beam nulling as a mitigation technique against jamming attacks in multihop ad hoc networks. Considering a moving jammer, a distributed beam nulling framework is proposed. The framework uses periodic measurements of the RF environment to detect direction of arrival (DoA) of jamming signal and suppresses the signals arriving from the current and predicted locations of the jammer. Also, in the calculation of the nulled region, this framework considers and counters the effects of randomness in the mobility of the jammer, as well as errors in beam nulling and DoA measurements. Survivability of links and connectivity in such scenarios are studied by simulating various node distributions and different mobility patterns of the attacker. Also, the impact of errors in the estimation of DoA and beam-forming on the overall network performance is also examined. In comparison with an omnidirectional configuration, results indicate a 57.27% improvement in connectivity under jamming when the proposed framework is applied.

Current Team Members:

Vahid Behzadan
Arslan Munir
Suman Bhunia
Paulo Alexander Regis
Shamik Sengupta

Affiliate Research Groups:

Computer Networking Lab (University of Nevada, Reno)

Intelligent Systems, Computer Architecture, Analytics, and Security (ISCAAS) Lab (Kansas State University)

Publications:

1. Behzadan, V. (2017). Cyber-physical attacks on uas networks-challenges and open research problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.01251.
2. Bhunia, S., Behzadan, V., Regis, P. A., & Sengupta, S. (2016). Adaptive beam nulling in multihop ad hoc networks against a jammer in motion. Computer Networks, 109, 50-66.
3. Bhunia, S., Behzadan, V., & Sengupta, S. (2015, October). Enhancement of spectrum utilization in non-contiguous dsa with online defragmentation. In MILCOM 2015-2015 IEEE Military Communications Conference (pp. 432-437). IEEE.
4. Bhunia, S., Behzadan, V., Regis, P. A., & Sengupta, S. (2015, August). Performance of adaptive beam nulling in multihop ad-hoc networks under jamming. In 2015 IEEE 17th International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, 2015 IEEE 7th International Symposium on Cyberspace Safety and Security, and 2015 IEEE 12th International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (pp. 1236-1241). IEEE.