A System-Theoretic Measure for Quantification of Vulnerabilities to Cyber Attacks with Application to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is on the rise as they find applications in different areas. The wide adoption of the solutions based on UAV’s continually raise issues and concerns related to the safety and security of UAV’s and their vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. It is therefore important to be able to quantify the level of vulnerability for UAV’s. In this paper, a new system theoretic measure is proposed which quantifies the level of vulnerability of dynamic systems to cyber attacks. A system is vulnerable to cyberattack, if it can be steered easily to a particular state by an attacker and the state is difficult to be observed by the existing sensing configuration. The developed measure is the generalized version of its linear counterpart, which has been previously defined and presented for linear systems. The proposed vulnerability measure is generic and can be used for different nonlinear dynamic systems, however, in this paper it is used to quantify the level vulnerabilities of UAV’s to cyber attacks.