Cyber Threat Analysis of Drone Detection and Early Warning Systems

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Systems across commercial, civilian, and military domains has elevated drone detection and early warning systems to a position of critical infrastructure for airspace protection. However, the cybersecurity dimensions of these detection architectures remain insufficiently characterized in the literature, with most prior work treating the sensor network as a trusted substrate rather than as a potential adversarial target. This paper conducts a structured systematic review of the cyber threat landscape confronting drone detection and early warning systems, synthesizing findings from the peer-reviewed primary-source corpus identified through the review process. The review applies a four-phase analytical pipeline comprising corpus assembly, threat-surface decomposition, cross-layer mapping using the STRIDE threat model, and defensive posture evaluation. Detection technologies are taxonomized according to the five-modality framework—acoustic, vision, passive radio frequency, active radar, and data fusion—and their respective vulnerabilities are mapped against the confidentiality, integrity, and availability pillars. Cyber threat primitives including spoofing, jamming, denial-of-service, hijacking, and malware injection are evaluated with respect to detection-infrastructure integrity. Results demonstrate that data fusion architectures, while operationally necessary, simultaneously expand the attack surface through insecure coordination channels, calibration-weight exchange, and time-synchronization dependencies. The integrity dimension—particularly GPS, ADS-B, and transponder spoofing—emerges as the dominant underserved attack vector. The study concludes that detection cybersecurity must be treated as coupled with detection engineering rather than separable from it, and identifies authenticated data fusion, spoofing-resilient localization, unified cyber-physical evaluation frameworks, blockchain-assisted coordination, and quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols as priority directions for future research.