Authentication of satellite navigation signals by wiretap coding and artificial noise

Abstract

Abstract In order to combat the spoofing of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals, we propose a novel signal authentication method based on information-theoretic security. In particular, the satellite superimposes to the navigation signal an authentication signal containing a secret authentication message corrupted by artificial noise (AN). We impose the following properties: a)Authentication and navigation signals are synchronous,b)Authentication and navigation signals are orthogonal andc)The secret message is undecodable by the attacker due to the AN. The legitimate receiver synchronizes with the navigation signal and stores the samples of the authentication signal with the same synchronization. After the transmission of the authentication signal, through a separate public asynchronous ground channel (e.g., a secure Internet connection) additional information is made public allowing the receiver to a)Decode the authentication message, thus overcoming the effects of AN, andb)Verify the authentication message. We assess the performance of the proposed scheme by the analysis of both the secrecy capacity of the authentication message and the attack success probability under various attack scenarios.

Keywords

• Artificial noise
• Authentication
• Global navigation satellite system
• Physical layer security
• Wiretap coding