Glitch in the Sky: Exploiting Voltage Fault Injection in UAV Flight Controllers

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 17 Apr 2026] Glitch in the Sky: Exploiting Voltage Fault Injection in UAV Flight Controllers Yun-Ping Hsiao, Yanda Li, Youssef Gamal, Halima Bouzidi, Mohammad Abudllah Al Faruque As Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) become increasingly pervasive and autonomous, ensuring the resilience of their embedded logic is critical to maintaining safety and integrity. Among the most stealthy and damaging threats are non-invasive fault injection attacks, where hardware-level disturbances propagate into software execution and compromise control logic. In this paper, we investigate the susceptibility of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) autopilot fail-safe mechanisms to voltage glitch fault injection. We introduce a dual evaluation approach: software-based fault simulation using ARMORY and hardware-based experiments with a voltage glitching platform (Chip-Whisperer), applying controlled and timely faults to an STM32 microcontroller running UAV-Autopilot fail-safe logic. Our targeted analysis of specific fail-safe modes uncovers timing-sensitive vulnerabilities that can suppress or alter safety responses, such as disabling emergency failsafe activation at critical moments, potentially enabling UAV hijacking. Furthermore, we validate software-based fault injection results against real hardware behavior, demonstrating how simulated attacks translate into tangible risks for CPS security and reliability. Comments: Technical Report Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.16699 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.16699v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.16699 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Halima Bouzidi [view email] [v1] Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:56:13 UTC (3,423 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)