Trustworthiness of Positional Data in Geoinformation Services: A Review of Documented Position Spoofing Techniques and Countermeasures

Geoinformation services increasingly ingest positions that were not verified by a surveyor: coordinates computed by satellite navigation receivers, self-reported location messages from ships, aircraft and smartphones, and map content contributed by volunteers. Each of these channels can be deliberately falsified, and such falsification has been observed outside the laboratory. The objective of this review is to order the documented techniques of position source spoofing that affect geoinformation services, and to assess how mature the corresponding countermeasures are. The study is a narrative literature review; it involves no experiments and no new measurements. The material comprises 35 sources: 27 peer-reviewed publications from 2007–2026, six institutional reports and service documents, one standard and one documented artistic intervention. They were identified through bibliographic databases, and every figure quoted from a report was checked in the original document of the organization that issued it. The analysis groups the documented techniques by the point at which false positions enter the geoinformation processing chain: the signal layer (counterfeiting or replay of open navigation signals), the report layer (forged position messages in protocols such as AIS and ADS-B, and falsified device locations), and the content layer (vandalism and Sybil attacks on crowdsourced mapping, and synthetic geographic imagery). The results show that all three layers have moved from proof-of-concept to operationally observed incidents, including thousands of suspected maritime spoofing events and, by August 2024, an industry estimate of about 1,500 flights per day whose broadcast positions showed signs of spoofing. Countermeasure maturity is asymmetric: since 2025 the signal layer has had an operational service that authenticates the navigation message of one constellation, though not the ranging signal itself, while the report and content layers rely mostly on anomaly detection. The maturity ratings presented here do not come from measurements; they are an expert assessment calibrated against the documented events cited in the text. The review concludes that position authenticity, understood as the assurance that a position record comes from the source it claims and has not been deliberately altered, should be treated as an explicit component of spatial data quality, alongside accuracy.