Overview of collaborative security mechanism research on unmanned swarm systems

Abstract

Unmanned swarm systems must achieve real-time, secure, and intelligent coordination to respond to dynamic environments and realize emergent swarm-scale capabilities. Current research predominantly focuses on static coordination tasks such as formation control, path planning, and task allocation, where task models are predefined to improve execution accuracy. Researchers have paid comparatively little attention to security requirements for adapting to environmental changes and resisting attacks. This survey categorizes collaborative security mechanisms into three dimensions: (1) fault tolerance, ensuring system resilience against communication or node failures; (2) consistency, maintaining unified perception, decisions, and actions across the swarm; and (3) attack resistance, defending against intrusion, spoofing, and data leakage. We review the state of the art across architecture security, network communication security, collaborative perception security, task security, and data privacy security, and identify open challenges and future directions. A capability-layer mapping matrix systematically reveals coverage patterns and research gaps across these dimensions.