GPS Spoofing-Resilient Filtering with Chimera and Self-Contained Odometry

Abstract

To protect civilian GPS users from spoofing, the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) has developed the Chips-Message Robust Authentication (Chimera) signal enhancement for the GPS L1C signal. With Chimera, standalone receivers which only have access to the GPS signal will be able to authenticate their received measurements once every 3 minutes, while users with access to an out-of-band source will be able to perform authentication once every 1.5 or 6 seconds. However, moving receivers typically rely on much faster real-time GPS update rates of between 1-20 Hz. In this work, we design a spoofing-resilient filter framework which provides continuous and secure state estimation between Chimera authentication times. By leveraging self-contained sensors on-board the vehicle, such as an inertial measurement unit (IMU) or wheel encoder, as well as the periodic Chimera authentication, our proposed filter determines how much to rely on the received, unauthenticated GPS measurements for state estimation. In this respect, our filter relies more extensively on GPS measurements in order to improve real-time navigation performance and reduce localization errors when GPS is authentic, while also successfully mitigating spoofing-induced errors during an experienced attack. We experimentally validate our proposed spoofing-resilient filter in a simulated test environment for a ground vehicle model with access to the 3-minute Chimera channel, under various simulated spoofing attack scenarios. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first adaptive filter proposed for Chimera which continuously leverages the real-time GPS measurements in a spoofing-resilient manner.