Collaborative Research: CISE-MSI: DP: OAC: Integrated and Extensible Platform for Rethinking the Security of AI-assisted UAV Paradigm

California State University San Marcos Corporation, San Marcos CA

Investigators

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, are widely adopted to support a spectrum of military, civilian, and commercial applications. With the rapid development of AI techniques, the AI-assisted UAV paradigm becomes promising to enhance various UAV operations in terms of intelligence, effectiveness, and efficiency. At the same time, the integration of AI and UAVs also raises new security and safety concerns. This project will investigate and develop a novel integrated and extensible platform to promote security research that uncovers vulnerabilities and designs countermeasures toward the AI-assisted UAV paradigm. In addition, this project will not only build and promote research capacity and resources for researchers at California State University San Marcos - a minority-serving institution, but also provide research and education experience to a large number of underrepresented minority students. This project will first design and develop a research platform for the secure integration of AI and UAVs. By leveraging the platform, this project will then investigate two directions of the secure AI-assisted UAV paradigm, including (1) security analysis of AI-enabled UAV anomaly detection and (2) robust AI-assisted UAV operations in adversarial environments. The contributions of this project will be threefold: (1) obtain an in-depth understanding of potential vulnerabilities introduced by the integration of AI and UAV, (2) explore the possibility of constructing effective attacks to exploit vulnerabilities and provide the measurement of impacts of these explorations, and (3) improve the security awareness and defense approaches of the prevalent research trend in the integration of AI and UAVs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.