RF-WAVEGUARD: Enhancing UAV Security Against Signal Jamming Attacks through Radio Frequency Watermarking

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become increasingly integral to a variety of industries, their dependency on radio frequency (RF) signal-based communication systems has exposed them to a multitude of security vulnerabilities. One of the most notable ones is RF jamming, which can disrupt communication, control, and navigation. While traditional countermeasures, such as Hardware Sandboxing [18], or Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on Deep Learning aim to mitigate these threats, they exhibit limitations in addressing sophisticated jamming attacks [8]. This paper presents a novel design of an authentication-based strategy using RF watermarking. Our proposed RF watermarking technique embeds hidden identifiers within RF signals to authenticate communication sources and detect jamming attempts. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme in enhancing UAV communication security and ensuring reliable operation in the presence of adversarial interference.