Security considerations in the design of tamper resistant GNSS receivers

The evolution of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) will see the introduction of new security services both in the civil and military domain. The threat of attacks against GNSS such as spoofing has lead to the design of GNSS signals and receiver technologies that attempt to address the problem both at the signal, data and receiver level. In particular, it is expected that modern GNSS will provide both in the civil and government domain access control to the signal through spreading code encryption or access control and/or authentication at the navigation data level. This will require the support on GNSS receiver for secure cryptographic keys and the implementation of security functions. The different security functions are identified and explained. The paper reviews a number of vulnerabilities of these security functions, and provides a number of design considerations in order to mitigate these attacks.