INTENT-CLOAKING COMMUNICATION FRAMEWORK FOR MISSION-CRITICAL UAV SYSTEMS

Abstract

The increasing deployment of mission-critical unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems in adversarial and operationally sensitive environments has introduced significant cybersecurity and operational survivability challenges. Existing UAV security mechanisms primarily emphasize communication confidentiality, authentication, and data integrity while largely overlooking a critical yet insufficiently explored threat, namely operational intent leakage through observable communication behavior. In adversarial operational environments, hostile observers may infer mission objectives, tactical phases, surveillance activities, or operational transitions by analyzing communication timing, transmission frequency, burst behavior, and interaction patterns, even when communication payloads remain encrypted. Such behavioral exposure may compromise mission secrecy, increase operational predictability, and facilitate adversarial targeting strategies. To address this limitation, this paper proposes an Intent-Cloaking Communication Framework (ICCF) for mission-critical UAV systems. The proposed framework introduces a lightweight adaptive communication camouflage architecture designed to conceal mission-revealing communication characteristics through transmission timing obfuscation, communication rhythm randomization, burst pattern suppression, and behavioral unpredictability enforcement. Unlike conventional security approaches that focus solely on protecting transmitted data, the proposed framework aims to preserve operational intent confidentiality under adversarial observation conditions. Furthermore, a mathematical intent leakage model is developed to quantify operational exposure probability, communication predictability, and behavioral stealth characteristics in hostile monitoring environments. The proposed framework is evaluated using a simulation-driven mission-critical UAV communication environment to analyze intent inference resistance, operational stealth efficiency, communication overhead, and latency impact under traffic observation and behavioral profiling attacks. Experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed ICCF framework significantly reduces adversarial mission inference capability while maintaining lightweight communication overhead and operational feasibility for mission-critical UAV deployments. The proposed approach establishes a practical and cybersecurity-oriented foundation for next-generation operational stealth preservation in adversarial UAV communication environments. Furthermore, NS-3-based packet-level validation confirms that ICCF effectively reduces mission-sensitive communication observability while preserving operational communication feasibility.