SonicNudge: Controlled Displacement of Hovering UAVs via Estimator-Controller Coupling

Redirecting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from their intended mission trajectories has been an active area of research. However, existing UAV redirection attacks lack reliability, precision, and covertness for a targeted diversion. They primarily rely on physical capture, communication hijacking, or sensor spoofing. Yet, physical interception is costly, offers only a single opportunity for success, and poses a high risk of collateral damage; network-based attacks demand deep technical expertise and access to encrypted communication channels; and sensor spoofing techniques typically fall short in achieving the accuracy and robustness required to steer a UAV toward a specified target. Consequently, we propose Phantom Navigator, a UAV redirection attack to mislead drones to a designated spoofing target, covertly and precisely. Our approach combines offline pre-redirection reachability analysis, which provides high-fidelity estimates of achievable redirect ranges, with an online closed-loop, stealthy execution layer that ensures successful redirection in practice. Based on this approach, we build a physical attack platform equipped with a LiDAR--camera detection, tracking, and spoofing stack that performs real-time identification, pose estimation, and computation of targeted spoofing signals to covertly and accurately redirect victim UAVs to a designated location. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our redirection methodology and the attack implementation in real-world case studies.

Gimbal-stabilized visual tracking is critical for modern autonomous systems such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). While prior work shows acoustic signals can disturb gimbal internals, the impact of such attacks on real-world applications like UAV tracking and following remains underexplored. Existing demonstrations largely overlook practical challenges for real-world attacks, such as object-motion uncertainty and runtime latency. To bridge this gap, we present Banshee, the first physically realizable attack that induces target switching in UAV visual tracking systems by exploiting acoustic vulnerabilities in gimbal-camera systems. Banshee generates carefully crafted acoustic waveforms that induce optimized adversarial gimbal oscillations, causing directionally biased camera-view drifts that break inter-frame target associations. Consequently, the onboard tracker is driven to switch from the original target to an attacker-selected object with high probability, with occasional target loss. Banshee achieves a 93.6% success rate in simulation across two commercial gimbal systems and five trackers. Real-world benchtop and in-flight black-box attacks against a commercial drone across varied scenarios show an overall 95.5% attack success rate. Our results reveal a practical cross-domain vulnerability between acoustics and vision, highlighting the need for robust designs of gimbal systems and applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/U1ltra/Banshee.

This paper studies UAV swarm search in GNSS-denied maritime environments, where inter-UAV ranging drives cooperative localization and uncertainty propagates along the multi-hop reference chain, affecting connectivity, collision avoidance, and search effectiveness. We propose an uncertainty-aware control barrier function (CBF) framework approximating cascading localization covariance through Fisher information matrices. First, the cascading covariance model captures how ranging noise and neighbor uncertainty accumulate along the localization chain. Second, uncertainty-tightened CBFs incorporate the covariance model and its rate into margins for connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance, with conditional invariance and graceful-degradation bounds. Third, a hierarchical Voronoi-target strategy with formation keeping supports efficient forward-looking coverage. The distributed controller is validated with a standard unbiased extended Kalman filter in the loop. The framework is demonstrated on several polygon shapes and swarm sizes from 6 to 30 sUAVs. An estimator-in-the-loop run completes the search in 302.5 s, 20 Monte Carlo deployments confirm repeatable completion with all local QPs feasible and containment in at least 98.97% of UAV-frames, and six MBZIRC runs provide estimator-in-the-loop evidence. The source code is publicly available.