A Light-Weight Technique to Detect GPS Spoofing Using Attenuated Signal Envelopes

Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing attacks have attracted more attention as one of the most effective GPS attacks. Since the signals from an authentic satellite and the spoofer undergo different attenuation, the captured envelope of fake GPS signals exhibits distinctive transmission characteristics due to short transmission paths. This can be utilized for GPS spoofing detection. The existing technique for GPS spoofing are either computationally too expensive, require specialize hardware/software updates, or are not accurate enough. To solve these issues, we propose a light-weight GPS spoofing detection method based on a dynamic threshold and captured signal envelope. We validate the proposed technique using experiments based on actual GPS signals and hardware. The relation between envelope characteristics and the distance between a GPS transmitter and receiver are revealed. Inspired by the uncovered relation, a threshold approach towards the detection of GPS spoofing is developed. The proposed approach features a dynamic threshold determined by the dispersion value of a signal envelope's variance instead of a fixed threshold to maximize detection performance in multiple attack scenarios. The results show that the proposed technique can effectively detect GPS spoofing attacks with better accuracy and lower computational complexity as compared to existing techniques.