A drone is a computer that can fall out of the sky
A web server that gets popped returns a 500 or leaks a database. A drone that gets popped falls on someone. Cyber-physical systems, meaning drones, robots, and industrial controllers, are computers wired to motors and sensors, so their failures and their attacks land in the physical world. Part of why I keep ending up here is that the stakes are more interesting. Most of why is simpler: working with real physical things is just more fun than software alone.
You can’t secure a controller you can’t read
The logic that flies a drone or runs a factory machine usually ships as an opaque binary. If you can’t read what the controller actually computes, you can’t tell whether it matches its spec, or whether someone slipped a backdoor in.
CONSTRUCT, work I did at PARC, goes after that. It takes a controller binary and rebuilds a readable mathematical model of the control law. Static analysis over the decompiled code builds a sketch of the math, then a genetic-algorithm search fills in the exact semantics. On real industrial systems it recovered models an expert could check for compliance or use in a forensic investigation.
You can’t crash real drones to study attacks
To study attacks and defenses you hit a wall. Regulators restrict security experiments on real UAVs, for good reason, and hardware testbeds are expensive and easy to destroy. So the field leans on simulation.
We built a ROS2-based simulator aimed squarely at security research, with a motion planner, controller, communication models, and attack models built in, on top of open tools like Gazebo. You can run a spoofing or jamming attack and its defense without anyone getting hurt or filing paperwork.
Then it has to survive the real airspace
Research here only matters if it changes how these systems get built and certified. I worked on the cyber-physical security parts of a report for the FAA on drones and swarms. Two ideas stuck with me. Resilience matters more than prevention, because a drone always flies through a noisy, contested environment and has to stay safe anyway. And swarms amplify everything, so an attack that barely dents one drone can destabilize the whole formation.