Awareness of GNSS vulnerabilities still needs to be improved in some areas due to its vitality in the current times, says Dan Martin, Technical Expert, Spirent Communications.
What are the reasons for increasing spoofing and jamming attacks, and what’s the economic impact of such attacks?
It is difficult to understand the motives of spoofing or jamming attacks. Often the most affected users are not the intended target — they just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The main threat actors are:
- Unstructured hacker
- Structured hacker
- Organized crime/industrial espionage
- Insider
- Unfunded terrorist group
- Funded terrorist group
- Nation/State
Each of these actors would have their specific motivation for jamming or spoofing.
It is difficult to determine the economic impact of a single attack that would need the affected organization to provide details. But to understand the cumulative economic impacts, the UK government commissioned a report in 2017 that estimated $6.29 billion (£5.2bn) worth of economic impact to the UK due to a five-day disruption to GNSS.
Do you think the pandemic has made the task to secure GNSS signals even more urgent? Why?
Yes, society has a high dependency on GNSS to provide precise timing and positioning information in numerous safety and liability critical applications. The pandemic has served to highlight our dependence on those services and applications (e.g., the operation of our Just-In-Time logistics/distribution chains or our telecoms networks or public transport systems) that are needed to keep society functioning normally.
How is quantitative data helpful in understanding receiver resilience and robustness to spoofing attacks?
Most of the reports we receive on real-world jamming and spoofing attacks are anecdotal. They inform us quite a bit about the impact that the user experiences but not enough about the systems or devices’ technical behavior. To understand this, it is necessary to recreate real-world scenarios in a laboratory setting wherein we can repeat the same attack several times while studying the system’s outputs or device. We can use that information to help inform designers, integrators, and users about robustness and resilience — or verify that a system or device meets categorization requirements. Our research can also help in the development of standards or regulations.
Please tell us about your GNSS study and assessment.
This study followed on from our previous paper, which was based on simulated spoofing giving the receivers an ideal scenario, i.e., perfect synchronization of time and power. This new study includes the use of live sky tests, which are quite realistic with several variables that could affect the outcome. Two receivers were tested in parallel against both live sky spoofing and simulated spoofing at 10, 50, and 100 meters. The results show a clear difference between simulated and live sky spoofing in terms of the receiver’s accuracy. It also shows that different receivers handle spoofing in different ways.
Which sectors are you covering?
This is a problem that is relevant to most sectors. Over the past several years, we have seen that real-world threats can affect most application areas, and the testing we have carried out could be applied to any domain. While these experiments were concerned with the positioning data, the experiment is equally valid for systems depending on precise timing data from GNSS.
With global incidents highlighting the threat to GPS systems, security has risen to the top of priority lists, including the long-overlooked GNSS spoofing, jamming, and interference. What more needs to be done?
The ‘Father of GPS,’ Dr. Bradfield Parkinson, proposed a layered approach to improve the situation with GNSS — Protect Toughen Augment (PTA). Protect is about the intelligent use of legislation, regulation, and standards to protect users of GNSS; Toughen is about hardening GNSS receivers and systems so that their resilience to GNSS threats is improved; and Augment is the use of complementary PNT systems to provide assurance that precise navigation or timing data is preserved during any period, where the use of GNSS is denied or severely degraded. Awareness of GNSS vulnerabilities still needs to be improved in some areas, and there is a need to test systems and devices against simulated real-world threats in a laboratory — not enough of what is carried out today. Still, it is vital to determine how your GNSS dependent systems and devices behave subjected to GNSS jamming or spoofing. A particular system may not be the intended target, but understanding the potential consequences can help mitigate most cost-effectively.
