Feedback Node Aided Distributed Spoofing System for Global Navigation Satellite System Time Synchronisation Attack

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is widely recognised to be vulnerable to spoofing attacks. A sophisticated form of GNSS spoofing, termed distributed spoofing, transmits each spoofing signal through dedicated antennas. This technique poses significant implementation difficulty in practical scenarios, owing to challenges including diverse propagation paths, inter‐node clock synchronisation and transmit‐receive isolation. This article proposes a feedback node aided distributed spoofing (FNA‐DS) system for executing GNSS time synchronisation attacks, enabling flexible implementation of distributed spoofing. Leveraging observations from a feedback node, the time biases and drifts of each spoofing node are estimated in real time and compensated during spoofing signal generation, ensuring false position, velocity and timing (PVT) solution accuracy and high pseudorange consistency. By dedicating the feedback node exclusively to signal reception and the spoofing nodes solely to signal transmission, the requirement for transmit‐receive isolation is relaxed. To comprehensively characterise the distributed spoofing threat, a detailed performance analysis of the FNA‐DS system is conducted, quantifying the impact of node position errors and time parameter estimation errors. Field experiments using a self‐developed distributed spoofing prototype validate the FNA‐DS system's effectiveness and expose limitations in existing direction of arrival (DoA) based anti‐spoofing techniques. Collectively, this work expands the capability frontier of GNSS spoofing, advances understanding of distributed spoofing and underscores its significance as a practical GNSS security threat.