The Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol presents no authentication mechanism on its version 1.0 (nor authorization) whichs leads to a variety of attacks including identity spoofing, unauthorized access, PITM attacks and more. According to literature, version 2.0 optionally allows for package signing which mitigates this flaw. Another source mentions that MAVLink 2.0 only provides a simple authentication system based on HMAC. This implies that the flying system overall should add the same symmetric key into all devices of network. If not the case, this may cause a security issue, that if one of the devices and its symmetric key are compromised, the whole authentication system is not reliable.

The Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLink) protocol presents authentication mechanisms on its version 2.0 however according to its documentation, in order to maintain backwards compatibility, GCS and autopilot negotiate the version via the AUTOPILOTVERSION message. Since this negotiation depends on the answer, an attacker may craft packages in a way that hints the autopilot to adopt version 1.0 of MAVLink for the communication. Given the lack of authentication capabilities in such version of MAVLink (refer to CVE-2020-10282), attackers may use this method to bypass authentication capabilities and interact with the autopilot directly.