Using Mobile Phones for Participatory Detection and Localization of a GNSS Jammer

It is well known that GNSS receivers are vulnerable to jamming and spoofing attacks, and numerous such incidents have been reported in the last decade all over the world. The notion of participatory sensing, or crowdsensing, is that a large ensemble of voluntary contributors provides measurements, rather than relying on a dedicated sensing infrastructure. The participatory sensing network under consideration in this work is based on GNSS receivers embedded in, for example, mobile phones. The provided measurements refer to the receiver-reported carrier-to-noise-density ratio ($C/N_0$) estimates or automatic gain control (AGC) values. In this work, we exploit $C/N_0$ measurements to locate a GNSS jammer, using multiple receivers in a crowdsourcing manner. We extend a previous jammer position estimator by only including data that is received during parts of the sensing period where jamming is detected by the sensor. In addition, we perform hardware testing for verification and evaluation of the proposed and compared state-of-the-art algorithms. Evaluations are performed using a Samsung S20+ mobile phone as participatory sensor and a Spirent GSS9000 GNSS simulator to generate GNSS and jamming signals. The proposed algorithm is shown to work well when using $C/N_0$ measurements and outperform the alternative algorithms in the evaluated scenarios, producing a median error of 50 meters when the pathloss exponent is 2. With higher pathloss exponents the error gets higher. The AGC output from the phone was too noisy and needs further processing to be useful for position estimation.

Participatory Sensing for Localization of a GNSS Jammer

GNSS receivers are vulnerable to jamming and spoofing attacks, and numerous such incidents have been reported worldwide in the last decade. It is important to detect attacks fast and localize attackers, which can be hard if not impossible without dedicated sensing infrastructure. The notion of participatory sensing, or crowdsensing, is that a large ensemble of voluntary contributors provides the measurements, rather than relying on dedicated sensing infrastructure. This work considers embedded GNSS receivers to provide measurements for participatory jamming detection and localization. Specifically, this work proposes a novel jamming localization algorithm, based on participatory sensing, that exploits AGC and C/N_0 estimates from commercial GNSS receivers. The proposed algorithm does not require knowledge of the jamming power nor of the channels, but automatically estimates all parameters. The algorithm is shown to outperform similar state-of-the-art localization algorithms in relevant scenarios.