Some Easy Swarm Exploits

Reliance on Local Interactions: Exploit: Swarms depend on communication and interaction between individual agents. Jamming or spoofing communication signals can disrupt their cohesion and coordination.

Limited Global Awareness: Exploit: Swarms often lack centralized control or a global perspective, relying instead on local sensing. Introducing misleading or deceptive local cues (e.g., decoy signals, fake targets) can mislead the swarm.

Sensitivity to Environmental Factors: Exploit: Swarms often rely on visual, acoustic, or radio-frequency (RF) sensing. Environmental manipulation (e.g., lights, dazzlers, smoke, RF jamming) can confuse their sensors or navigation algorithms.

Cascading Failures :Exploit: The emergent behavior of swarms means that disruptions to a few agents can propagate through the system. Strategic disabling or hacking of a few drones can destabilize the entire swarm.

Overcrowding in Confined Spaces: Exploit: Swarms rely on maintaining separation between agents, one of Boyds laws. Introducing barriers or restricting movement can cause congestion and collisions. Compression attacks using things like Air Mines works well.

Predictable Behavior: Exploit: Swarm algorithms often follow deterministic or predictable rules. Reverse-engineering these rules allows adversaries to anticipate and counter swarm movements or formations. There are ways to do automated discovery for this.

Dependence on Power and Resources: Exploit: Swarms rely on finite battery life and resource availability. Prolonging engagements or forcing swarms into energy-intensive tasks depletes their power. In computer security there is a idea of a drain attack where the attacker performs a operation on the target that causes the targets battery to drain faster than normal.