Spotr: GPS spoofing detection via device fingerprinting

Abstract

As the world's predominant navigation system, GPS is critical to modern life, finding applications in diverse areas like information security, healthcare, marketing, and power and water grid management. Unfortunately this diversification has only served to underscore the insecurity of GPS and the critical need to harden this system against manipulation and exploitation. A wide variety of attacks against GPS have already been documented, both in academia and industry. Several defenses have been proposed to combat these attacks, but they are ultimately insufficient due to scope, expense, complexity, or robustness. With this in mind, we present our own solution: fingerprinting of GPS satellites. We assert that it is possible to create signatures, or fingerprints, of the satellites (more specifically their transmissions) that allow one to determine nearly instantly whether a received GPS transmission is authentic or not. Furthermore, in this paper we demonstrate that this solution detects all known spoofing attacks, that it does so while being fast, cheap, and simpler than previous solutions, and that it is highly robust with respect to environmental factors.