Detection of GPS Spoofing Attacks on Unmanned Aerial Systems

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) have received a huge interest in military and civil applications. Applications of UAS are dependent on successful communications of these systems with different entities in their networks. A UAS network can include the UAS, ground control station, navigation satellite system, and automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) receiver. Through these entities, a UAS is vulnerable to different cyber-attacks such as GPS spoofing. In this attack, a malicious user transmits fake signals to the GPS receiver on the UAS. The fake signals can mislead not only the aircraft but also air traffic controllers, leading to serious problems. These problems range from aircraft hijacking to collisions and human casualties. This paper proposes a supervised machine learning method based on the artificial neural network to detect GPS spoofing signals. Different features such as pseudo range, Doppler shift, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are used to perform the classification of GPS signals. We examine and compare the efficiency of one-and two-hidden-layer neural networks with various numbers of hidden neurons. The results show that our proposed method provides a high probability of detection and a low probability of false alarm.