ION Alberta Lunch Meeting – Friday January 24, 2014

Ali Broumandan and Ali Jafarnia Jahromi from the University of Calgary presented GNSS Vulnerability to Spoofing Threats and a Review of Antispoofing Techniques [Download Here]

Abstract
GNSS dependant timing and positioning systems have become widespread in various civilian applications and such a widely used system increasingly becomes an attractive target for illicit exploitation by terrorists and hackers for various motives. However, GNSS signals are quite vulnerable to different types of interference since they are very weak once received on the earth surface. Among various intentional interference signals, structural interferences (e.g. spoofing and meaconing) are much more dangerous since they are designed to mislead their target receiver(s) that are not aware of the attack and this can lead to disastrous consequences in dependent applications. Spoofing and meaconing signals’ features are very similar to those of authentic GNSS signals; therefore, it is very difficult for a GNSS receiver to discriminate their presence. This presentation investigates the vulnerability of GNSS signal to a spoofing attack. After introducing spoofing signal model, a brief review of recently proposed anti-spoofing techniques and their performance in terms of spoofing detection and spoofing mitigation will be provided. Limitations of anti-spoofing algorithms is discussed and some methods is introduced to ameliorate these limitations. In addition, testing the spoofing/anti-spoofing methods is a challenging topic that encounters some limitations due to stringent emission regulations. This talk also provides a review of different test scenarios that have been adopted for testing anti-spoofing techniques.

Speaker’s Bios

Ali Broumandan received his Ph.D. degree from the Geomatics Engineering department of University of Calgary in 2009. He achieved the Parkinson award for graduate student excellence in Global Navigation Satellite Systems for his thesis in 2010. Currently he is with PLAN group of the University of Calgary as a senior research associate where his research focuses on GNSS interference mitigation utilizing antenna array processing. Dr. Broumandan has been involved in several industrial research projects focusing on spatial/temporal characterization of GNSS channels in dense multipath environments and synthetic antenna array processing.

Ali Jafarnia Jahromi received his Ph.D. in Geomatics Engineering from the Position, Location and Navigation (PLAN) group of the University of Calgary in 2013. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology. He is currently working as a Senior Research Associate/Post-Doctoral Fellow in the PLAN group of the University of Calgary. His research interests include signal processing in GNSS applications, array processing, statistical signal processing and GNSS receiver design.