Rigid-Covert GNSS Spoofing of UAV Swarms: A Structural Blind Spot, Its Detection Limit, and Absolute-Anchor Defenses

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 7 Aug 2026] Rigid-Covert GNSS Spoofing of UAV Swarms: A Structural Blind Spot, Its Detection Limit, and Absolute-Anchor Defenses Minseok Park, Joon Soo Yoo Cooperative UAV-swarm defenses commonly cross-check GNSS positions against measured inter-drone geometry. We show that this relative-geometry channel has a structural blind spot: a common, slowly varying translation (a rigid-covert shift, RigidShift) preserves all pairwise distances and is therefore unobservable to any relative-only detector (a gauge-freedom argument). We validate this blindness on distance-verification and semidefinite-feasibility baselines, while explicitly distinguishing it from onboard inertial/GNSS monitors that can raise a bare alarm but cannot recover the swarm's true position. To quantify when an external reference restores observability, we derive the drift-dependent detection floor 2γ/(1− t s /T) for a calibrated anchor-residual detector and empirically identify an additional detector-specific noise floor (measured slope 2.66 vs. predicted 2.67). We then present a centralized anchor-rooted recovery pipeline that reconstructs swarm geometry from inter-drone ranges, aligns it to a trusted-anchor subset with Byzantine-robust fitting, and recovers the absolute positions of non-anchored drones. A segmented estimator jointly estimates anchor drift, attack rate, and onset when no clean-epoch label is available. Across statistical simulations, ArduPilot software-in-the-loop experiments, and Gazebo experiments with rendered vision anchors, the method recovers the positions of non-anchored drones to a median error of 0.39 m (20 seeds) under approximately 10.1 m of GNSS drift, and to 7.1 cm (5 seeds) in the rendered-vision multi-SITL setting. We also characterize the explicit limits imposed by non-collinear anchor geometry, anchor coverage, τ→0 drift-attack aliasing, and majority anchor compromise. All evaluations are simulation-based and use no RF spoofing hardware or physical swarm. Comments: 15 pages, 15 figures, Simulation-based study Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Robotics (cs.RO) Cite as: arXiv:2608.06885 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.06885v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.06885 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Minseok Park [view email] [v1] Fri, 7 Aug 2026 07:15:55 UTC (1,150 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.RO 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?)