Trust Across the Skies: Survey of All-Altitude Aero-Space Security#

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Keywords: embedded system security, hardening and attacks, embedded inference

Today’s situation is connectivity without a shared trust floor. All-altitude aero-space systems now couple satellites, aircraft, drones, base stations, and cloud control planes into one operational fabric—so a fault or compromise at a single layer can cascade upward to vehicles and platforms or downward to end devices. The surface is no longer a single box or a single protocol: GPS spoofing, signal jamming, avionics intrusion, and weak authentication or key management on cross-domain links can undermine safety and mission continuity within minutes. Pure device-level hardening cannot keep up with this stack, and isolated case studies cannot establish whether defenses compose end to end.

Our approach treats aero-space security as a layered survey with an explicit chain of targets, threats, and mitigations. We collect a representative map of aero-space targets across altitudes and supporting infrastructure; study existing attacks and defenses at hardware, protocol, and system layers; and organize findings so cascading paths—from cloud and base station through aircraft and satellite—are visible rather than buried in domain silos. The goal is a reference picture that unifies trusted execution, integrity verification, and secure orchestration without reducing the problem to sample platforms alone.

The objectives are to:

Collect a representative list of aero-space targets (satellites, aircraft, drones, base stations, and supporting cloud infrastructures)
Study existing mitigations and attacks across altitudes and cross-domain links (e.g., GPS spoofing, signal jamming, avionics intrusion, weak authentication and key management)