Effect of Tracking Parameters on GNSS Receivers Vulnerability to Spoofing Attack

Abstract

Civilian GNSS signals are highly vulnerable to spoofing attacks due to the publicly known signal structure and lack of protection against it. A spoofing signal which is synchronized to authentic ones can deceive the tracking process of a receiver and may lead to a fake position solution. This paper focuses on analyzing the effect of spoofing signal parameters on a target receiver in overlapped spoofing attack scenarios. It is assumed that the receiver is operating in a tracking loop and the spoofing tries to grab the correlation function without causing loss of lock. The spoofing parameters to successfully capture the tracking point as a function of the target receiver’s PLL and DLL parameters are discussed. The problem of interest is to detect a spoofing attack by utilizing different signal quality monitoring (SQM) metrics and characterizing the pseudorange measurement error induced by the spoofer as a function of delay lock loop parameters. The statistical properties of the spoofing detection metrics are analyzed and proper detection thresholds are calculated. Some experimental results in dense multipath environments for vehicular applications have been performed to adjust the SQM metrics detection threshold and to reduce the false spoofing detection probability.