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

无人驾驶飞行器（uav）或无人驾驶飞机被广泛采用，以支持军事，民用和商业应用的频谱。随着人工智能技术的快速发展，人工智能辅助无人机模式有望在智能、有效性和效率方面提高各种无人机的作战能力。与此同时，人工智能与无人机的融合也引发了新的安全问题。该项目将调查和开发一个新的集成和可扩展平台，以促进安全研究，发现漏洞并设计针对人工智能辅助无人机范式的对策。此外，该项目不仅将为加州州立大学圣马科斯分校这一少数族裔服务机构的研究人员建立和提升研究能力和资源，还将为大量未被充分代表的少数族裔学生提供研究和教育经验。该项目将首先设计和开发一个研究平台，用于人工智能和无人机的安全集成。通过利用该平台，该项目将研究安全人工智能辅助无人机范例的两个方向，包括(1)人工智能支持的无人机异常检测的安全分析和(2)在对抗环境中强大的人工智能辅助无人机操作。本项目的贡献将体现在三个方面：(1)深入了解人工智能与无人机融合带来的潜在漏洞；(2)探索构建有效攻击以利用漏洞的可能性，并提供这些探索的影响测量；(3)提高人工智能与无人机融合的流行研究趋势的安全意识和防御方法。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.