A Survey on Security of UAV Swarm Networks: Attacks and Countermeasures

The increasing popularity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms is attributed to their ability to generate substantial returns for various industries at a low cost. Additionally, in the future landscape of wireless networks, UAV swarms can serve as airborne base stations, alleviating the scarcity of communication resources. However, UAV swarm networks are vulnerable to various security threats that attackers can exploit with unpredictable consequences. Against this background, this article provides a comprehensive review on security of UAV swarm networks. We begin by briefly introducing the dominant UAV swarm technologies, followed by their civilian and military applications. We then present and categorize various potential attacks that UAV swarm networks may encounter, such as denial-of-service attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and attacks against Machine Learning (ML) models. After that, we introduce security technologies that can be utilized to address these attacks, including cryptography, physical layer security techniques, blockchain, ML, and intrusion detection. Additionally, we investigate and summarize mitigation strategies addressing different security threats in UAV swarm networks. Finally, some research directions and challenges are discussed.