Mapping Bit to Symbol Unpredictability with Application to Galileo Open Service Navigation Message Authentication

Abstract

This paper investigates the distribution of unpredictable symbols in the open service navigation message authentication (OSNMA) scheme, which introduces cryptographic elements into the Galileo I/NAV message. Prior work has described the forward estimation attack (FEA; Curran & O’Driscoll, 2016), that takes advantage of the forward error correction (FEC) employed by the Galileo E1 OS to ensure that a spoofed receiver correctly decodes the I/NAV message, even if it has been generated with errors in some symbols. In order to defend against such an attack, the receiver can re-encode the navigation message into symbols and compare the symbol error rates for those symbols that are predictable and those that are not. In order to perform this, it is first necessary to know which symbols are unpredictable. This paper presents in detail how this can be achieved, including the impact of the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) on symbol unpredictability.