UAVLnQ: An Architecture for Security Analysis of Cyber-Physical Network Behavior in UAV Swarms
Abstract
The design and validation of security architectures for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms, such as on-board Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), require simulation platforms that can rapidly prototype complex cyber-physical scenarios. These platforms must simultaneously capture accurate flight dynamics and realistic network behavior while remaining scalable and reproducible. This paper introduces Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Link and Queue (UAVLnQ), an open-source architecture explicitly designed to address these challenges. It integrates ArduPilot Software-in-the-Loop (SITL) with ns-3 through a ZMQ middleware that guarantees synchronization between mobility control and packet-level events. UAVLnQ features an autopilot mission control system for defining and executing complex swarm behaviors. We demonstrate its capabilities in a leader-follower formation under representative cyber-attacks-including command injection, spoofing, and denial of service-providing a validated environment for the development and testing of novel security and resilience solutions. UAVLnQ thus establishes itself as a reproducible and extensible foundation for a new generation of UAV swarm networking and cyber-defense research.
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