A Survey of Security Challenges and Solutions for Advanced Air Mobility and eVTOL Aircraft

2026-01-08

AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum

AI Summary

This study addresses the critical gap in systematic defense frameworks for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) systems, which face escalating threats such as GPS spoofing, communication jamming, and avionics vulnerabilities. The work presents the first comprehensive threat taxonomy tailored to AAM/eVTOL, integrating multidimensional attack surfaces spanning avionics, unmanned systems, and cloud services. Through rigorous threat modeling and security assessments of key technologies—including GPS, ADS-B, TCAS, electronic flight bags (EFBs), and flight management systems—the authors propose a customized security architecture. The research identifies salient threat vectors, synthesizes effective mitigation strategies, highlights limitations in current protective measures, and outlines directions for future defensive innovations and open security challenges in this emerging domain.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight
• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems

Abstract

This survey reviews the existing and envisioned security vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms relevant to Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) systems, with a focus on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Drawing from vulnerabilities in the avionics in commercial aviation and the automated unmanned aerial systems (UAS), the paper presents a taxonomy of attacks, analyzes mitigation strategies, and proposes a secure system architecture tailored to the future AAM ecosystem. The paper also highlights key threat vectors, including Global Positioning System (GPS) jamming/spoofing, ATC radio frequency misuse, attacks on TCAS and ADS-B, possible backdoor via Electronic Flight Bag (EFB), new vulnerabilities introduced by aircraft automation and connectivity, and risks from flight management system (FMS) software, database and cloud services. Finally, this paper describes emerging defense techniques against these attacks, and open technical problems to address toward better defense mechanisms.

Problem

• Advanced Air Mobility
• eVTOL
• security vulnerabilities
• cyber threats
• aviation security

Innovation

• Advanced Air Mobility
• eVTOL security
• attack taxonomy
• secure architecture
• aviation cyber threats