GNSS Signal Authentication via Power and Distortion Monitoring
This addresses security vulnerabilities in GPS and GNSS systems for civil users, offering a low-cost, firmware-updatable solution without external hardware.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting spoofing and jamming attacks on civil GNSS receivers by proposing a Power-Distortion detector that classifies signals based on power and distortion observations, achieving correct detection in all malicious attacks with a <0.6% false alarm rate in tests on over 900,000 detection instances.
We propose a simple low-cost technique that enables civil Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and other civil global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers to reliably detect carry-off spoofing and jamming. The technique, which we call the Power-Distortion detector, classifies received signals as interference-free, multipath-afflicted, spoofed, or jammed according to observations of received power and correlation function distortion. It does not depend on external hardware or a network connection and can be readily implemented on many receivers via a firmware update. Crucially, the detector can with high probability distinguish low-power spoofing from ordinary multipath. In testing against over 25 high-quality empirical data sets yielding over 900,000 separate detection tests, the detector correctly alarms on all malicious spoofing or jamming attacks while maintaining a <0.6% single-channel false alarm rate.