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BERLIN—LITEF, a Northrop Grumman subsidiary based in Freiburg, Germany, is developing technologies to make GPS receivers resilient to spoofing, in addition to the less challenging jamming threat.
With the increasing number of conflict zones, civil aircraft are more susceptible to encountering global navigation satellite system (GNSS, such as the U.S. GPS) jamming, when signal is unavailable, or spoofing, when false signals are transmitted to mislead receivers.
Crews also rely on inertial reference systems (IRS), which are immune to jamming and spoofing but prone to drift—small errors that accumulate, typically 2 nm per hour. Inertial systems use GNSS to correct those errors. Therefore, an inertial system that would include spoofing detection, and an associated workaround, would help civil aviation safety.
LITEF, a supplier of GPS receivers for business and regional aircraft, helicopters and military trainers and uncrewed vehicles, has been working on such improvements. The LCR-110 GNSS-aided inertial system can detect satellite errors and spoofing events. Comparing GPS-based information to the expected position, the system can perceive spoofing, detecting position jumps down to 1 nm in three-to-six sec. A Kalman filter, using short-term memory, can calculate the position’s integrity, a crucial parameter in performance-based navigation, Klaus Blatter, LITEF’s product manager for commercial aviation, said at ILA Berlin. “If you start to rely purely on the IRS, the first minutes are fine because the drift is still small and we can calculate the integrity,” he said.
However, when spoofing is detected, the system is already infected. “In the future, we will take the wrong information out,” Blatter said. LITEF thus plans to introduce new anti-spoofing algorithms. Moreover, company engineers are studying how to detect position jumps down to 0.1 nm. A new-generation receiver, including better resilience to spoofing—and accompanying greater computing power for anti-spoofing algorithms and other improvements—may take five-to-six years to develop and certify, Blatter said. LITEF is considering an intermediate product that would focus on anti-spoofing features, he added.
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