When the Base Station Flies: Rethinking Security for UAV-Based 6G Networks
The Security Challenge of UAV-Powered 6G Networks
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): As 6G networks prepare to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as flying base stations for disaster relief and rural connectivity, researchers have identified critical security vulnerabilities including emergency alert spoofing, wireless backhaul jamming, GPS manipulation, and resource exhaustion attacks that could compromise millions of users—challenges that demand immediate attention as standards development continues. The technology's potential military applications, already emerging in conflicts like Ukraine, add urgency to securing these systems against sophisticated state-level threats.
The future of wireless communications is taking to the skies, but it's bringing unprecedented security challenges along for the ride. As telecommunications engineers and standards bodies work toward sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, one of the most promising yet vulnerable innovations involves deploying unmanned aerial vehicles as flying cellular base stations—a development that could revolutionize connectivity in disaster zones and underserved areas while simultaneously opening new attack vectors that don't exist in traditional ground-based networks.
The Promise of Airborne Connectivity
The integration of non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) into next-generation cellular systems represents a fundamental shift in how we think about telecommunications infrastructure. While 5G networks primarily rely on fixed terrestrial towers, 6G envisions a fully integrated space-air-ground network incorporating satellites, high-altitude platform systems, and crucially, UAVs operating as mobile base stations.
Unlike satellites operating in fixed orbits or high-altitude platforms that require extensive deployment time, UAV base stations (UAV-BS) can be rapidly deployed to provide immediate connectivity. This makes them particularly valuable for disaster recovery scenarios where terrestrial infrastructure has been damaged, temporary capacity increases during large events, or extending coverage to remote rural areas where building traditional cell towers isn't economically viable.
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the international body that develops cellular network standards, has been progressively incorporating NTN features since Release 15, with 5G-Advanced (Release 18) enabling NTN-specific enhancements. For UAV base stations specifically, the technical requirements are relatively straightforward: replace the wired backhaul connection with a wireless link and ensure the UAV operates according to 3GPP standards on the access link connecting to user devices.
A New Attack Surface in the Sky
But what happens when your base station can fly? According to recent research from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the answer is a dramatically expanded attack surface that fundamentally differs from terrestrial network vulnerabilities.
The research, led by Ammar El Falou and published in December 2025, identifies several critical vulnerability categories unique to or exacerbated by UAV-based systems. Unlike traditional base stations housed in secured facilities with continuous power and wired connections, UAV base stations operate under severe constraints: limited battery capacity, restricted processing power, wireless backhaul links vulnerable to interference, and dependence on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals for positioning and flight control.
Emergency Alert Weaponization
Perhaps the most alarming vulnerability involves the emergency alert system itself. Current 3GPP implementations deliver emergency alerts—warnings about earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks, or missing children—through system information blocks (SIBs) that are neither authenticated nor encrypted. This design choice maximizes the likelihood that alerts reach all users in an affected area, even those without active subscriptions, but it creates a critical security gap.
El Falou's team recently implemented the emergency alert service using the open-source OpenAirInterface project, demonstrating that smartphones and tablets parse these alerts with clickable links, phone numbers, and email addresses rendered directly on the alert screen. "This transforms a safety mechanism into a powerful phishing vector," the researchers note. With UAV base stations, the threat multiplies—a malicious UAV can move across large geographic areas, broadcasting fake alerts to successive populations of users.
Even more concerning, the research found that alert messages can be transmitted and received even when the core network is offline, meaning a rogue UAV base station requires no supporting infrastructure to conduct these attacks. With AI-enabled smartphone assistants becoming ubiquitous, researchers warn of potential automated exploitation scenarios where fake alerts interact directly with AI assistants without requiring direct user action.
The Handover Hijacking Problem
UAV mobility introduces another attack vector largely absent from terrestrial networks: malicious handover manipulation. In cellular systems, handovers allow user devices to transition between base stations without service interruption, primarily based on signal strength measurements. While these measurements are encrypted, attackers can exploit the handover procedure by setting up fake base stations that mimic legitimate ones.
In terrestrial networks, executing such attacks requires the attacker to position equipment in specific locations and transmit at higher power than legitimate base stations. With UAV-based systems, a rogue UAV can dynamically maneuver to stay close to targeted devices, continuously adjusting position to maintain signal superiority. This enables denial-of-service attacks, man-in-the-middle interception, and information disclosure affecting both individual users and network operators.
Resource Exhaustion in a Power-Limited Platform
The limited computational and energy resources of UAV base stations make them particularly vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. The initial connection procedure in 5G networks, known as the Random Access Channel (RACH) procedure, is unauthenticated—the base station allocates resources to users before receiving and verifying their identity. Attackers can exploit this by repeatedly initiating connection attempts, each time pretending to be a new user, until the base station exhausts its available resources and begins rejecting legitimate connection attempts.
This so-called "RRC signaling storm attack" poses a greater threat to UAV base stations than to terrestrial ones because of their constrained processing power and battery capacity. Research on detecting these attacks in terrestrial networks has shown that comparing the number of received connection requests to successful attachments can provide a baseline for detection, but effective mitigation techniques specific to UAV environments remain an open research question.
Wireless Backhaul Vulnerabilities
Traditional cellular base stations connect to core network infrastructure through secure wired connections—typically fiber optic cables housed in protected conduits. UAV base stations, by necessity, use wireless backhaul links that are inherently vulnerable to jamming and interception. Jamming attacks can disrupt connectivity for potentially hundreds or thousands of user devices simultaneously, while interception may expose sensitive control-plane information exchanged between the access network and core infrastructure.
Multiple jamming categories exist—constant, reactive, random, and deceptive—each with different detection and mitigation challenges. For UAV systems, proposed defensive techniques include beam nulling (deactivating the receiver in the direction of the jamming signal), UAV repositioning to avoid targeted jamming, and deploying cooperative defense using additional UAV base stations to maintain coverage when the primary UAV is under attack.
GPS Spoofing: Hijacking the Platform Itself
Perhaps the most fundamental vulnerability stems from UAVs' dependence on GNSS signals for navigation and flight control. GPS spoofing attacks—where false satellite signals trick a receiver into calculating an incorrect position—can misdirect UAV flight paths, create coverage blackouts, force UAVs into restricted airspace, or even cause collisions between multiple UAVs.
Unlike jamming, which simply disrupts signals, spoofing is more insidious because the UAV continues to believe it's receiving legitimate navigation data. An attacker could potentially redirect a UAV base station away from the area it's meant to serve, push it into a no-fly zone where it might be captured or destroyed, or manipulate its position to optimize conditions for other attacks like handover manipulation.
Mitigation strategies under investigation include multi-constellation fusion (combining data from GPS, Galileo, and BeiDou systems to detect inconsistencies), signal power monitoring (spoofed signals often arrive at anomalous power levels), angle-of-arrival estimation, and a technique particularly relevant to 6G hybrid terrestrial-non-terrestrial networks: cross-checking UAV positions against location data from terrestrial base stations.
The Military Dimension: Lessons from Ukraine
The security vulnerabilities of UAV-based cellular networks take on heightened significance when considered in military contexts, where the stakes extend beyond civilian inconvenience to tactical advantage and battlefield survival. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has provided an inadvertent proving ground for both the potential and the dangers of rapidly deployable communications infrastructure in contested environments.
Communications as Critical Infrastructure in Modern Warfare
Modern military operations depend on robust communications for command and control, intelligence gathering, coordination of forces, and increasingly, for operating autonomous systems and remotely piloted vehicles. When Russia's invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, one of the immediate priorities was attacking Ukraine's telecommunications infrastructure. Russian forces targeted cell towers, fiber optic cables, and switching centers, creating vast communications blackouts in occupied and contested areas.
The rapid restoration of connectivity in these areas became a strategic priority. While much attention has focused on Starlink satellite terminals provided by SpaceX, the broader challenge of maintaining cellular connectivity for military forces, civil defense, and civilian populations has driven interest in rapidly deployable solutions—precisely the niche that UAV base stations are designed to fill.
Tactical Applications and Vulnerabilities
In military contexts, UAV base stations offer several advantages over traditional communications solutions. They can be deployed within hours rather than weeks, repositioned as battle lines shift, and provide coverage in areas where terrestrial infrastructure has been destroyed or where building permanent installations isn't feasible. For forces operating in denied or contested territory, a UAV base station can establish a communications bubble for tactical operations without requiring vulnerable ground-based equipment.
However, every advantage creates a corresponding vulnerability when facing a sophisticated adversary. The same GPS dependence that allows UAV base stations to maintain precise positioning makes them vulnerable to military-grade GPS spoofing and jamming systems. Russia has demonstrated extensive electronic warfare capabilities in Ukraine, including jamming of GPS signals, disruption of drone operations, and interference with communications systems. A UAV base station operating in such an environment faces not just the theoretical attacks outlined in academic research, but active, well-resourced attempts to disrupt, capture, or destroy it.
The wireless backhaul vulnerability becomes particularly acute in military scenarios. While civilian UAV base stations might use standard 5G frequencies for backhaul communications, military applications would require encrypted tactical data links. Yet even encrypted communications reveal information through traffic analysis—patterns of activity, timing of transmissions, and locations of communication nodes can provide intelligence to adversaries even when message content remains protected.
Information Operations and Deception
The emergency alert spoofing capability identified in the KAUST research acquires a different character in military information warfare. A hostile UAV base station could broadcast fake emergency alerts to civilian populations in occupied territories, sowing panic, directing evacuations along preferred routes, or undermining trust in legitimate government communications. During active combat operations, false alerts about incoming missile strikes, chemical weapons attacks, or evacuation orders could create chaos that facilitates military operations or covers other activities.
Ukraine has reported numerous Russian information operations attempts, including fake emergency alerts, spoofed messages purporting to come from Ukrainian military or government sources, and attempts to intercept or disrupt legitimate communications. The mobility of UAV base stations makes attribution and countermeasures more difficult—a ground-based fake cell tower can be located and destroyed, but a UAV can broadcast its false messages and relocate before countermeasures can be employed.
Conversely, Ukrainian forces could potentially use UAV base stations to provide communications for military operations in temporarily seized Russian territory, or to broadcast information to civilian populations in occupied areas. The dual-use nature of the technology means that the same system that provides disaster relief in peacetime becomes a tool of information operations in conflict.
Electronic Warfare Integration
Modern military electronic warfare doctrine increasingly treats the electromagnetic spectrum as a contested domain comparable to air, sea, or land. UAV base stations represent both assets to be protected and targets to be attacked within this domain. The research on jamming attacks against wireless backhaul links directly parallels military electronic warfare techniques, while GPS spoofing attacks described in academic literature are essentially civilian adaptations of military electronic warfare capabilities.
The conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that electronic warfare operates at scales and intensities rarely seen in civilian contexts. Russian forces have employed powerful jamming systems covering broad areas and multiple frequency bands, GPS spoofing that has affected civilian aviation and maritime navigation, and targeted attacks against specific communications systems. In such an environment, the mitigation techniques proposed for UAV base stations—beam nulling, repositioning, multi-constellation fusion—must operate against adversaries with sophisticated understanding of these defenses and the resources to overcome them.
Ukraine's experience has also highlighted the importance of communications resilience through redundancy and diversity. Military operations have employed a mix of Starlink terminals, tactical radios, civilian cellular networks, and improvised solutions. UAV base stations would add another layer to this communications architecture, but their value depends on them not representing a single point of failure that could be targeted by electronic warfare or kinetic attack.
Capture and Exploitation Risks
The physical vulnerability of UAV base stations creates unique risks in military contexts. A downed or captured UAV base station potentially provides adversaries with cryptographic keys, network architecture information, operational procedures, and technical intelligence about friendly communications systems. The research notes that UAVs can be forced into restricted zones through GPS spoofing, but in warfare, "restricted zones" might be enemy-controlled territory where capture becomes likely.
During the Ukraine conflict, both sides have captured substantial quantities of enemy equipment, including drones, communications gear, and electronic warfare systems. The intelligence value of a captured UAV base station would depend on the security architecture—whether keys are stored in tamper-resistant modules, whether the system can remotely wipe sensitive data if capture appears imminent, and whether compromise of one unit could affect the security of the broader network.
This creates a challenging trade-off for military UAV base station design. Robust security mechanisms require additional computing power, which increases weight, power consumption, and cost—all critical constraints for UAV platforms. Military systems must balance the need for sophisticated security with the practical realities of platform limitations, especially for systems intended for rapid deployment in austere conditions.
The Escalation Problem
The military applications of UAV base stations raise broader questions about escalation and conflict dynamics. Communications infrastructure has traditionally occupied an ambiguous space in the laws of war—civilian communications are generally protected, but military communications are legitimate targets. A dual-use technology that can rapidly shift between civilian and military applications complicates these distinctions.
If a nation deploys UAV base stations to restore civilian connectivity in disaster-affected areas during peacetime, and then uses the same technology for military communications during conflict, adversaries may treat all UAV base stations as legitimate military targets regardless of their actual use in specific instances. This creates risks for humanitarian organizations and civilian authorities who might deploy these systems for disaster relief but find them targeted based on their potential military applications.
The Ukraine experience suggests these concerns are not merely theoretical. Russia has targeted civilian communications infrastructure throughout the conflict, claiming it serves military purposes. The international community's response to these attacks has highlighted disagreements about proportionality, dual-use infrastructure, and civilian harm. UAV base stations, with their rapid deployability and flexibility between civilian and military uses, would likely face similar scrutiny in future conflicts.
Toward Military-Grade Security
The military imperative for secure UAV base stations drives different requirements than civilian applications. Latency requirements may be less stringent if encryption adds milliseconds to communications, but the cryptographic strength must withstand nation-state level cryptanalysis. Authentication mechanisms must resist spoofing even when adversaries have substantial signals intelligence capabilities and captured equipment to study. The systems must remain operational under intensive electronic warfare conditions that would never be encountered in civilian scenarios.
Some mitigation strategies become more feasible in military contexts. Cooperative defense using multiple UAV base stations aligns with military doctrine of redundancy and resilience. Cross-layer verification between terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks could incorporate military-specific position verification systems beyond civilian GPS. The computational resources for sophisticated security mechanisms might be available on larger military UAV platforms even if civilian systems must make different trade-offs.
The conflict in Ukraine has accelerated military interest in adaptable, resilient communications systems. As this technology matures and moves toward 6G implementation, the security lessons learned in military applications will likely inform civilian system design, just as military communications innovations have historically migrated to civilian use. However, the security requirements for military UAV base stations represent an upper bound on the threat model—if systems can be secured against sophisticated nation-state adversaries in active combat, they should withstand the threats facing civilian deployments.
The Broader Context of Cellular Security
These UAV-specific vulnerabilities exist within the already challenging landscape of cellular network security. Securing terrestrial networks has proven difficult due to standards complexity, vendor-specific implementations, backward compatibility requirements, and the presence of unauthenticated broadcast signals—issues well-documented in research on rogue base station attacks against 4G and 5G networks.
Studies over the past several years have demonstrated various attacks on terrestrial cellular systems, from identity catching and location tracking to exposing device capabilities and manipulating the connection process. The extension of these challenges to 6G non-terrestrial networks, particularly UAV base stations, introduces further vulnerabilities related to wireless backhauling and limited resources while also creating novel opportunities for defensive strategies that leverage UAV mobility.
Toward Secure Airborne Networks
Addressing these security challenges requires what researchers call a fundamental rethinking of network security assumptions. When connectivity extends into the air, design principles that worked for ground-based infrastructure may no longer apply. The research community has identified several promising directions for securing UAV-based networks:
Authentication of broadcast information: One approach involves implementing integrity checks for system information blocks to prevent spoofing, or enabling user devices to verify received emergency alerts against governmental alert registries before displaying them. For military applications, this might extend to cryptographic authentication of all broadcast signals, accepting the trade-off of limiting service to authorized users in exchange for preventing spoofing attacks.
Anomaly detection systems: For attacks like handover manipulation and RRC signaling storms, profiling normal behavior patterns and flagging deviations could provide early warning. Physical signal characteristics—received power levels, angle of arrival, distribution of connection requests over time—offer potential indicators for distinguishing legitimate traffic from attacks. Military systems might incorporate threat intelligence feeds and electronic warfare detection capabilities to enhance these systems.
Leveraging UAV mobility: Paradoxically, the same mobility that creates security challenges can also enable defenses. Adaptive repositioning allows UAV base stations to evade localized jamming or optimize defensive configurations. The ability to rapidly deploy additional UAVs means compromised or overwhelmed units can be supplemented or replaced more quickly than in terrestrial networks. In military contexts, UAV base stations could coordinate with other aerial assets for mutual protection and electronic warfare support.
Cross-layer verification: Hybrid terrestrial-non-terrestrial 6G networks create opportunities for what researchers call "backhaul-assisted validation," where UAV positions determined via GNSS can be cross-checked against positions calculated by terrestrial base stations, providing a mechanism to detect GPS spoofing. Military implementations might incorporate inertial navigation, terrain reference navigation, or other GPS-independent positioning systems to maintain operations when satellite navigation is denied.
Resource management optimization: Given the severe computational and energy constraints of UAV platforms, security mechanisms must be designed with efficiency as a primary goal. This requires careful trade-offs between processing performance that permits robust security measures and lightweight design that enables better flight capabilities. Military UAV base stations, operating on larger platforms with more power available, may implement more sophisticated security at the cost of reduced flight time or operational radius.
Tamper resistance and secure key management: Particularly for military applications, protecting cryptographic keys and sensitive configuration data from physical capture requires tamper-resistant hardware modules, secure boot procedures, and remote wipe capabilities. These features add cost and complexity but become essential when facing adversaries who actively seek to capture equipment for intelligence exploitation.
The Path Forward
The security challenges of UAV-based 6G networks sit at the intersection of multiple technical domains: cybersecurity, wireless communications, aviation systems, artificial intelligence, and increasingly, military electronic warfare. Addressing them will require what El Falou characterizes as "cross-disciplinary cooperation between cybersecurity, communications, and aviation communities"—and, given the military applications, defense and intelligence communities as well.
Critically, security cannot be an afterthought bolted onto UAV-based systems after deployment. The research emphasizes integrating security as a design principle in NTN standards from the ground up—a lesson learned from decades of retrofitting security onto cellular systems originally designed without sufficient security considerations. The military experiences in Ukraine and other recent conflicts underscore the urgency of this integration, as these systems will operate in environments where adversaries have both the motivation and resources to exploit every vulnerability.
The development of secure UAV base stations faces a fundamental tension between civilian and military requirements. Civilian systems prioritize accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and ease of deployment, sometimes accepting security trade-offs to achieve these goals. Military systems demand higher security even at the cost of complexity, expense, and operational constraints. The 6G standards must somehow accommodate both use cases, potentially through configurable security profiles that allow systems to operate in different modes depending on operational context.
International cooperation on UAV base station security faces additional complications from the technology's military applications. While civilian telecommunications standards benefit from open international collaboration through bodies like 3GPP, military communications requirements often involve classified information and national security considerations that limit information sharing. Nations may be reluctant to disclose sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities or defense mechanisms that could provide operational advantages in potential conflicts.
Yet the fundamental security research—understanding attack vectors, developing mitigation techniques, and establishing best practices—serves both civilian and military communities. The academic security community can contribute to more secure 6G networks regardless of application, while military research on operating in contested electromagnetic environments can inform civilian systems designed to be resilient against sophisticated attacks.
As standards bodies like 3GPP continue developing 6G specifications and as telecommunications companies and military organizations begin pilot deployments of UAV base stations, the window for addressing these fundamental security issues before widespread deployment remains open but narrowing. The promise of ubiquitous connectivity—from dense urban centers to remote disaster zones, from routine civilian communications to critical military operations—depends on building these flying networks with security as their foundation, not as an addition.
The stakes are considerable. UAV base stations will be indispensable for emergency connectivity, smart city ecosystems, bridging the digital divide in underserved regions, and providing tactical communications for military forces. But without comprehensive security measures, these same systems could become vectors for mass phishing campaigns, enable widespread service disruptions, compromise the privacy and safety of millions of users, or fail at critical moments in military operations where communications can mean the difference between mission success and catastrophic failure. The challenge now is ensuring that when base stations take flight, they carry robust security mechanisms along with their antennas—mechanisms tested not just against theoretical attacks but against the demonstrated capabilities of nation-state adversaries operating in the contested electromagnetic environment of modern warfare.
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When the Base Station Flies: Rethinking Security for UAV-Based 6G Networks
The integration of non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) into 6G systems is crucial for achieving seamless global coverage, particularly in underserved and disaster-prone regions. Among NTN platforms, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are especially promising due to their rapid deployability. However, this shift from fixed, wired base stations (BSs) to mobile, wireless, energy-constrained UAV-BSs introduces unique security challenges. Their central role in emergency communications makes them attractive candidates for emergency alert spoofing. Their limited computing and energy resources make them more vulnerable to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and their dependence on wireless backhaul links and GNSS navigation exposes them to jamming, interception, and spoofing. Furthermore, UAV mobility opens new attack vectors such as malicious handover manipulation. This paper identifies several attack surfaces of UAV-BS systems and outlines principles for mitigating their threats.
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