Countering Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS)
through Cyber-Electromagnetic Convergence

ICE-CEM will develop a unified framework for understanding, exploiting, and defending against cyber-electromagnetic (cyber-EM) interactions in current and next-generation UAS. We study how cyber and EM actions propagate through sensing, communications, hardware, computation and control—and how they can be combined to produce precise physical, cyber and reconnaissance effects. By formalizing this action-to-effect pipeline, we aim to translate mission-level objectives into coordinated actions with predictable outcomes, even with limited prior knowledge of the target.

Our research spans techniques, tactics and operations: reusable cyber-EM primitives, which exploit the EM threat landscape for UAS, and the technologies that enable them, are combined into tactics that affect UAS capabilities, then coordinated through AI-enabled reasoning into operations that adapt as targets and environments change. The ICE-CEM framework will establish the scientific foundations for adaptive cyber-EM kill-webs, with rigorously quantified tradeoffs among attack reliability, cost, energy, time and robustness under uncertainty and active countermeasures.