
Safety-critical and mission-oriented applications have seen an increase in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These require reliable real-time flight control and robust security guarantees. Modern UAV platforms are integrated with sensing, computation, communication, and control capabilities utilizing embedded System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. However, with increasing levels of autonomy, connectivity, and computational complexity, UAVs are all exposed to many types of cyber-physical security threats, both in dual-use and the civilian sector. Examples of threat actors to a UAV include communication spoofing, sensor manipulation, firmware tampering, and hardware Trojan attacks. This paper is a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art secure and reconfigurable System-on-Chips (SoCs) and SoC architectures for UAV flight control applications. It provides a systematic review of UAV flight control system architectures, embedded computing platforms, and UAV cyber-physical system-specific security challenges. Additionally, it defines a UAV flight control-specific threat model and attack taxonomy and discusses vulnerabilities associated with the communication, sensing, control, software, and hardware levels of a UAV. It also discusses the role of FPGA-based and FPGA-SoC platforms as a means of augmenting hardware-assisted security and runtime adaptability. Finally, the authors identify key research gaps and propose control-aware, dynamically reconfigurable secure SoC architectures for the next generation of UAV flight controllers.
UAV Flight Control Applications, Chip Architectures, Secure and Reconfigurable System
UAV Flight Control Applications, Chip Architectures, Secure and Reconfigurable System
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