  The Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) sector is fast-expanding. Protection of
real-time UAV applications against malicious attacks has become an urgent
problem that needs to be solved. Denial-of-service (DoS) attack aims to exhaust
system resources and cause important tasks to miss deadlines. DoS attack may be
one of the common problems of UAV systems, due to its simple implementation. In
this paper, we present a software framework that offers DoS attack-resilient
control for real-time UAV systems using containers: ContainerDrone. The
framework provides defense mechanisms for three critical system resources: CPU,
memory, and communication channel. We restrict attacker's access to CPU core
set and utilization. Memory bandwidth throttling limits attacker's memory
usage. By simulating sensors and drivers in the container, a security monitor
constantly checks DoS attacks over communication channels. Upon the detection
of a security rule violation, the framework switches to the safety controller
to mitigate the attack. We implemented a prototype quadcopter with commercially
off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software. Our experimental
results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework defending
against various DoS attacks.
