Security Evaluation of GNSS Signal Quality Monitoring Techniques against Optimal Spoofing Attacks

GNSSs have a significant impact on everyday life and, therefore, the are increasingly becoming an attractive target for illicit exploitation. As such, anti-spoofing algorithms have become an relevant research topic within the GNSS discipline. This Thesis provides a review of recent research in the field of GNSS spoofing/anti-spoofing, designs a method to generate an energy optimal spoofing signal and evaluates the performance of the anti-spoofing signal quality monitoring techniques against it

Cooperative Authentication in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

With the growing use of underwater acoustic communications (UWAC) for both industrial and military operations, there is a need to ensure communication security. A particular challenge is represented by underwater acoustic networks (UWANs), which are often left unattended over long periods of time. Currently, due to physical and performance limitations, UWAC packets rarely include encryption, leaving the UWAN exposed to external attacks faking legitimate messages. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for message authentication in a UWAN setting. We begin by observing that, due to the strong spatial dependency of the underwater acoustic channel, an attacker can attempt to mimic the channel associated with the legitimate transmitter only for a small set of receivers, typically just for a single one. Taking this into account, our scheme relies on trusted nodes that independently help a sink node in the authentication process. For each incoming packet, the sink fuses beliefs evaluated by the trusted nodes to reach an authentication decision. These beliefs are based on estimated statistical channel parameters, chosen to be the most sensitive to the transmitter-receiver displacement. Our simulation results show accurate identification of an attacker's packet. We also report results from a sea experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Author version of paper accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication