About the project

Why this project

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and UAS Traffic Management (UTM) will bring electric air taxis and fleets of small drones into dense urban airspace, coordinated largely by automated airspace services. Aircraft autonomy depends on the avionics software stack, aircraft sensors, automated airspace management, and communication, navigation, and data links, every one of which an adversary may try to spoof, jam, hack, or manipulate.

This project establishes a security framework and algorithmic foundations to safeguard high-density urban airspace against cyberattacks, focusing on heterogeneous aircraft and airspace operations: eVTOL vehicles in AAM and small UAS in UTM. Its results are intended to raise industry awareness of vulnerable links, inform investment in mitigations, and recommend security updates for system architectures, avionics software standards, and communication, navigation, and surveillance infrastructure.

How we work

Research is organized around three technical challenges and a cross-cutting validation and demonstration plan. Cross-institution subteams form around concrete aviation use cases, meet regularly, and come together in monthly project meetings, an internal research seminar series, invited talks from industry and government experts, and annual review meetings hosted by partner institutions.