Sripath Mishra, Bharat Bhargava, Zizheng Liu et al.
Intrusion detection systems (IDS) trained on wired-network benchmarks degrade sharply in real-world unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, where mobility, fluctuating link quality, and decentralized routing reshape traffic distributions. Existing UAV-specific datasets also do not systematically vary these conditions, leaving no way to train or test an IDS against the very shift that defeats it. We present UAV-CAS, a large-scale labeled flow dataset for UAV-network intrusion detection, generated by a Containernet digital twin that is systematically calibrated against AERPAW testbed measurements. We have a four-layer calibration pipeline spanning altitude-dependent path loss, mission-specific mobility, the link-level performance chain, and end-to-end trace fidelity. UAV-CAS comprises 99,492 flows drawn from 1,024 configurations that span five attack families (DoS, DDoS, blackhole, wormhole, replay) and nine collaborative attack compositions. A diversity analysis shows that high-rate attacks separate from benign traffic up to an order of magnitude more strongly than in any prior benchmark, while stealth attacks deliberately blend with benign traffic. Across ten baseline IDS, binary attack detection saturates above $0.98$, confirming the dataset is learnable, whereas full attack-class identification remains hard -- per-class $F_1$ ranges from near zero to $0.82$ and falls into the single digits for stealth attacks. We release the dataset, simulator, and calibration data to support reproducible UAV intrusion-detection research.