Security Threats and Countermeasures of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Communications

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in various fields, including but not limited to military, industry, and agriculture. But UAVs also confront severe security threats, which slows down their wide application. Current research mainly focuses on the security of a single UAV system, while paying little attention to UAV-related communications, especially in the physical and network layers. Thus, it becomes necessary to summarize potential security threats and corresponding countermeasures. To this end, we study mainstream attacks on UAV communications in order to propose security requirements. Then we present a comprehensive review on existing security countermeasures for enhancing UAV communication security in both the physical and network layers. We conclude with open issues and future prospects of UAV security. © 2017 IEEE.