Cyber First Aid · Developed with DARPA Funding

Real-Time, Self-Healing Cybersecurity for Drones

A vehicle that can be attacked mid-flight — and defend itself — without rebooting, without a ground link, and without a human in the loop.

The Problem

Drones Can Be Hijacked Mid-Mission — and Today's Defenses Are Too Slow

Reboot means falling

You can't power-cycle a flight computer mid-air.

No link home

GPS-denied or contested environments cut off the ground station.

Attacks move fast

A hijacked function can act long before a human notices.

The First Aid Solution

Cyber First Aid Gives a Drone Its Own Immune System

It watches its own flight software from the inside, catches a hijacked function in real time, and shuts down just that function — automatically — while the vehicle keeps flying.

“Like a pacemaker with a built-in defibrillator — for flight software.”

< 10 sec

To detect and stop an attack

Reboots required

Network or ground link needed

How It Works

Three Steps, Fully Automatic, On Board the Vehicle

1. Watch

Lightweight monitors are woven into the flight software itself — no manual rewrite of the drone's code required — quietly tracking how every function behaves.

2. Catch

An on-board watchdog spots the pattern of a hijacked function — in about a second — with no ground station and no network involved.

3. Neutralize

The compromised function is automatically shut off before it can do harm, while every other part of the flight software keeps running normally.

Not a Simulation

Demonstrated Live, on Real Flight Hardware

Cyber First Aid runs on the same open-source autopilot software used across industry and defense — not a lab mockup. The attack, the detection, and the fix all happen on the vehicle itself, fully disconnected from any network.

Runs on the flight controller and companion computer
Built on PX4, the widely-used open-source autopilot
Fully air-gapped — no outside connection needed
Requires no custom or modified flight firmware

The Scenario

What Happens, Start to Finish

1
Clean state
System healthy, no threats active
2
Attack begins
A malicious function starts firing
3
Detected
Watchdog flags the pattern in seconds
4
Blocked
Function shut off; ground control notified
5
Flight continues
Drone keeps flying, threat neutralized

What's Next — Self-Healing

From Blocking an Attack to Fully Healing From One

Full repair, not just a block

Swap the compromised code for clean code in flight, restoring full capability instead of just disabling the threat.

Broader anomaly detection

Build a live map of “normal” flight behavior so any kind of deviation — not just this attack — gets flagged by an orchestrated library of detectors.

GPS spoofing defense

Cross-check GPS against references a spoofer can't touch — inertial sensors, barometer, mission geometry — to catch injected, fake position and velocity signals.

Why It Matters

AI-capable adversaries can craft attacks that evade network monitoring, parameter checks, and flight-data anomaly detection — because those defenses operate on data an attacker can model and tune offline. Cyber First Aid watches what the firmware actually computes: a layer an attacker cannot decouple from achieving their goal. It runs on commodity, open-source hardware costing under $350 — reproducible, not proprietary.

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