FC-TEE: Lightweight trusted execution environment for low-cost UAV flight control systems

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

11-2025

Abstract

Uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) flight control systems are increasingly exposed to software-level security threats. However, existing trusted execution environment (TEE) technologies that can effectively defend against software attacks are difficult to deploy on the low-cost UAVs due to: 1) the lack of onboard security hardware; 2) limited memory protection unit (MPU) resources; and 3) strict real-time requirements. To address these issues, we design flight control TEE (FC-TEE), a lightweight TEE framework tailored for low-cost UAV platforms, which integrates fine-grained memory isolation and a multilevel task scheduling strategy. By analyzing the flight control code and control principles, we provide three key attributes (task priority, maximum invocation frequency, and required argument types) of flight control tasks and classify these tasks into two categories: 1) privileged tasks and 2) common tasks based on the attributes. Then, we run the privileged tasks in FC-TEE to achieve memory isolation from common tasks, protecting the privileged tasks from software attacks. Meanwhile, we design multilevel task scheduling based on the task priority and categories to ensure the real-time requirements of the flight control system. Compared with existing UAV protection solutions, such as MINION and TrustZone-based RT-TEE, the average additional execution overhead introduced by FC-TEE only is 2.7%. We prototype FC-TEE on a real quadrotor platform and validate its effectiveness through task-level performance and security evaluations.

Keywords

Embedded system, task scheduler, trusted execution environment (TEE), uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV)

Discipline

Information Security | Software Engineering

Publication

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Volume

12

Issue

21

First Page

1

Last Page

14

ISSN

2327-4662

Identifier

10.1109/JIOT.2025.3600637

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2025.3600637

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS