Study and Evaluation of GNSS Signal Cryptographic Authentication Defenses

Due to the public signal structure of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) civil signal, civil receivers are threatened by a variety of spoofing attacks. For different spoofing attacks, the robustness of different authentication techniques is compared and analyzed. The analysis shows that authentication techniques fail to handle forward spoofing attacks. Based on the comparison of elliptic curve digital signature (ECDSA) and time effect stream loss authentication (TESLA), the navigation information authentication (NMA) scheme of combination of ECDSA and TESLA is proposed. The proposed authentication scheme solves the problem of the computation and time synchronization of the traditional NMA techniques. Finally, the spreading code authentication (SCA) technique is used as an example to evaluate the performance of the cryptographic authentication techniques by simulation. The simulation shows that authentication can greatly improve the antispoofing performance of civil receivers.