A Survey of Security Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Air Mobility and eVTOL Aircraft

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews security vulnerabilities and defense strategies for Advanced Air Mobility and eVTOL aircraft, emphasizing threat vectors, mitigation techniques, and future research challenges.

Contribution

It provides a taxonomy of attacks, analyzes existing mitigation strategies, and proposes a secure system architecture specific to the AAM and eVTOL ecosystem.

Findings

Identification of key threat vectors like GPS spoofing and RF misuse

Analysis of vulnerabilities in avionics and automation systems

Discussion of emerging defense techniques and open problems

Abstract

This survey reviews the existing and envisioned security vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms relevant to Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems, with a focus on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Drawing from vulnerabilities in the avionics in commercial aviation and the automated unmanned aerial systems (UAS), the paper presents a taxonomy of attacks, analyzes mitigation strategies, and proposes a secure system architecture tailored to the future AAM ecosystem. The paper also highlights key threat vectors, including Global Positioning System (GPS) jamming/spoofing, ATC radio frequency misuse, attacks on TCAS and ADS-B, possible backdoor via Electronic Flight Bag (EFB), new vulnerabilities introduced by aircraft automation and connectivity, and risks from flight management system (FMS) software, database and cloud services. Finally, this paper describes emerging defense techniques against these attacks, and open technical problems to address toward better defense mechanisms.