Considering how important it is for everything from navigation to keeping clocks in sync, satellite navigation systems are surprisingly vulnerable to a variety of attacks, ranging from simple jamming to …. Defeating Satellite Spoofing with Galileo’s Encryption. This may be changing, though, as Galileo, Europe’s GNSS, recently demonstrated its first cryptographically-secured position fix under spoofing conditions.
Most GNSS systems, including GPS, have no verification measures to keep an adversary from transmitting a false signal at a higher power and hijacking a receiver; since GNSS signals are extremely weak by the time they reach the ground, this presents no great difficulty to a moderately well-equipped attacker. Galileo’s Signal Authentication System (SAS) aims to fix this. The Galileo ground station pre-selects signal spreading codes, which it then encrypts with a regularly-changing secret key and publishes.
A receiver which anticipates needing a verified signal can then download these encrypted codes ahead of time and store them. Galileo satellites then transmit on the E6-C pilot signal, and the receiver records the signal. After transmitting a message block, it then transmits the decryption key on a separate signal, which the receiver uses to recover the spreading codes.
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