Using Range Information to Detect Spoofing in Platoons of Vehicles

GNSS are well known to be accurate providers of position information across the globe. Because of high signal availabilities, capable/robust receivers, and well-populated satellite constellations, operators typically believe that the location information provided by their GNSS receiver is correct. More sophisticated users are concerned with the integrity of the derived location information. Attacks on GNSS availability and integrity are known as jamming and spoofing. Jamming involves the transmission of signals that interfere with GNSS reception so that the receiver is unable to provide a position or time solution; various methods to detect jamming, and possibly overcome it, have been considered in the literature. Spoofing is the transmission of counterfeit GNSS signals so as to mislead a GNSS receiver into reporting an inaccurate position or time. If undetected, spoofing might be much more dangerous than a jamming attack. A variety of approaches have been proposed in the literature to recognize spoofing. Of interest here are methods which compare GNSS information to measurements available from other, non-GNSS sensors. Recent ION conferences have included several examinations of combining GNSS and non-GNSS data toward spoof detection. This paper considers the use of range-only information to detect GNSS spoofing of a platoon of vehicles equipped with inter-vehicle communications: a statistical model of the problem is developed in which the spoofer is assumed to have limited geographical impact (i.e. only spoofs a subset, nominally one, of the vehicles in the platoon); under a Neyman-Pearson formulation the (generalized) likelihood ratio test to fuse the GNSS and range measurements is presented; examples are included to demonstrate the resulting performance.