Stars can tell: A robust method to defend against GPS spoofing attacks using off-the-shelf chipset

Shinan Liu, Xiang Cheng, Hanchao Yang, Yuanchao Shu, Xiaoran Weng, Ping Guo, Kexiong Curtis Zeng, Gang Wang, Yaling Yang

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

21 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The GPS has empowered billions of users and various critical infrastructures with its positioning and time services. However, GPS spoofing attacks also become a growing threat to GPS-dependent systems. Existing detection methods either require expensive hardware modifications to current GPS devices or lack the basic robustness against sophisticated attacks, hurting their adoption and usage in practice.
In this paper, we propose a novel GPS spoofing detection framework that works with off-the-shelf GPS chipsets. Our basic idea is to rotate a one-side-blocked GPS receiver to derive the angle-of-arrival (AoAs) of received signals and compare them with the GPS constellation (consists of tens of GPS satellites). We first demonstrate the effectiveness of this idea by implementing a smartphone prototype and evaluating it against a real spoofer in various field experiments (in both open air and urban canyon environments). Our method achieves a high accuracy (95%-100%) in 5 seconds. Then we implement an adaptive attack, assuming the attacker becomes aware of our defense method and actively modulates the spoofing signals accordingly. We study this adaptive attack and propose enhancement methods (using the rotation speed as the “secret key”) to fortify the defense. Further experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the enhanced defense.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages3935-3952
ISBN (Print)9781939133243
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2021
Event30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021 - Virtual
Duration: 11 Aug 202113 Aug 2021
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/technical-sessions

Publication series

NameProceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium

Conference

Conference30th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2021
Period11/08/2113/08/21
Internet address

Bibliographical note

Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s).

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