GPS-Spoofing Attack Detection Mechanism for UAV Swarms

Abstract: Recently autonomous and semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms started to receive a lot of research interest and demand from various civil application fields. However, for successful mission execution, UAV swarms require Global navigation satellite system signals and in particular, Global Positioning System (GPS) signals for navigation. Unfortunately, civil GPS signals are unencrypted and unauthenticated, which facilitates the execution of GPS spoofing attacks. During these attacks, adversaries mimic the authentic GPS signal and broadcast it to the targeted UAV in order to change its course, and force it to land or crash. In this study, we propose a GPS spoofing detection mechanism capable of detecting single-transmitter and multi-transmitter GPS spoofing attacks to prevent the outcomes mentioned above. Our detection mechanism is based on comparing the distance between each two swarm members calculated from their GPS coordinates to the distance acquired from Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband ranging between the same swarm members. If the difference in distances is larger than a chosen threshold the GPS spoofing attack is declared detected.