GNSS spoofing risk: still an unsolved issue
It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you. It’s what you think you know!
GNSS systems are deployed in a huge quantity of applications
- Malicious spoofing acts can be extremely sophisticated;
- Many spoofing events have actually caused the misplacement of the position returned by receivers;
- GNSS Spoofing is adding risks to a vast set of applications, mostly unaware of such a vulnerability;
- Of primary concern is the proliferation of personal privacy jammers designed to defeat vehicle-tracking systems, and the easiness of using low cost Software Defined Radio (SDR) equipment for imitating or re-transmitting GNSS signals, with the goal to defeat them locally.
The availability of such low-cost spoofing systems results in an underestimated risk, exposing any GNSS user at spoofing actions, mainly because no adequate countermeasures exist yet
- Augmentation systems, e.g. EGNOS, are not adequate to solve the issue, because they aim at granting the signal quality at the origin of the transmission and not at the utilization point. Although extremely reliable at the origin, many facts demonstrated that spoofing actions can even provide a false sense of confidence to the user, since the spoofed signal may also contain the assurance provided by augmentation systems;
- Future cryptographic techniques on both Galileo and, possibly, on GPS will not definitely solve the issue: cryptography could be defeated, for instance, by retransmitting the received signal without any need of interpreting it: security ≠ cryptography.
OUR SOLUTION
- A novel GNSS augmentation concept certifies time and position and mitigates the risk of a false geolocation;
- Detects and possibly tolerates spoofing actions;
- It’s currently based on standard HW and SW technologies, easily evolving towards a miniaturized implementation.
