Reverse Engineering and Control-Aware Security Analysis of the ArduPilot UAV Framework

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies are attracting significant interest across many domains, making UAV security of utmost importance. ArduPilot is one of the most widely used open-source UAV autopilot frameworks. Numerous studies have identified vulnerabilities that impact these systems. Vulnerabilities in its communication subsystems (including Wi-Fi, telemetry, and GPS) expose critical entry points, and vulnerabilities in ArduPilot itself can compromise the control process. In this paper, we reconstruct the software architecture and control models implemented by ArduPilot and discuss attack hypotheses that exploit these control models to induce malicious behavior using only legitimate inputs.