Estimating the Effectiveness of Protocol-Aware Jamming Technique with a Navigation Message on Navigation Systems Onboard UAVs

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) present security threats to vital facilities, as the unauthorized use of these drones could cause accidents or carry attacks or illegal surveillance. Thus, it is necessary to prohibited drones from flying over important facilities. Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver forms the heart of the navigation system of UAV, and without it, it is difficult to control and direct the aircraft. In this paper, we propose a design of a jamming system for GPS receivers and its implementation using the protocol-aware jamming technique, which includes a navigation message. We also present the results of a simulation done using MATLAB to generate a jamming signal conforming to the GPS satellite signal-shaping protocol. In addition, using software-defined radio platforms and other software tools we generated signals identical to the civilian use signals broadcasted by 13 GPS satellites on the L1 frequency (1575.42 MHz) which currently contains the coarse/acquisition (C/A) code, with a transmission power of -3.5 dBm; with the possibility of adjusting the timing in the navigation message to locate a fake location.

The proposed system was tested using several small UAVs, and the results showed the success of the protocol-aware jamming technique in blinding the receiver from the real GPS satellite signals, making it receive fake signals; thus changing the real aircraft location to a pre-selected fake location.