GNSS Anti-Spoofing Defense Based on Cooperative Positioning

Radio navigation is of utmost importance in several application fields. Nowadays, many civil and professional applications massively rely on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and related technologies to accurately estimate position and time. Existing GNSS-based systems are threatened by malicious attacks among which spoofing and meaconing constitute severe challenges to the receiver. Several of such GNSS systems constitute mass market applications and devices, and a threat to the GNSS receiver could have cascading effects at application levels and for interconnected systems. Networked GNSS receivers are in general ubiquitous because any receiver embedded in a complex system such as a smart device or smart connected cars can exploit network connectivity. This novel generation of valuable-performance GNSS receivers are prone both to standard RF spoofing attacks and to cyber-attacks conceived to hijack complex network based services such as DGNSS-based cooperative positioning. By means of a set of experimental tests, this paper highlights possible metrics to be checked to identify malicious attacks to the positioning and navigation systems in mass market connected devices. The network-based exchange of GNSS data such as GNSS raw measurements recently disclosed in Android smart devices is conceived in this work to offer the possibility to compare or combine such metrics to better identifies spoofing and meaconing attacks.