THE IMPACT OF RADIO FREQUENCY INTERFERENCE AND SPOOFING ON GNSS RELIABILITY AT BALTIC SEA

Kurzfassung

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are used as the main source for Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) information for maritime, land vehicles, and aircraft applications. However, GNSS is susceptible to radio frequency interference (RFI) and signal spoofing, which can compromise the safety of systems requiring navigation and timing information. In the last year, we have witnessed a rapid growth of the number of GNSS spoofing and jamming attacks at a global scale, as evidenced by the disruption of PNT-reliant interfaces in the civil aviation and the posterior analysis on ADS-B data. In the context of radio threat mitigation, novel antenna design and receiver signal processing have been shown with great potential. Besides the well-known beamforming and robust digital processing techniques, methods exploiting Machine Learning have demonstrated a great potential for dealing with the new radio attacks. Unfortunately, the prohibitive economic and computational cost of the former solutions means that most of these solutions are unavailable for their commercial use. Thus, this work provides a study case on jamming incidents for the Baltic Sea region, based on the analysis of GNSS from multiple land- and sea-based sources. The data analysis covers the period from Dec. 2023 to April 2024 and is Baltic Sea wide. It includes data collection from a number of Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) and also dynamic data from a ferry vessel covering the Rostock-Trelleborg route. We can conclude that since Dec. 2023 the Baltic Sea region has experienced increased GPS interference and significant disturbance on the L1 band, affecting navigation accuracy for both aircraft and maritime vessels. Furthermore, we have categorized the interference levels in three regions; low interference with 98% accuracy, for medium interference with 90-98% accuracy, and for high interference with accuracy below 90%. Vessels navigating through these zones face varying levels of GPS reliability. Initial results demonstrate that SNR signal has the disturbance on L1 frequency at Baltic Sea. Overall, it is clear that the Baltic Sea region is undergoing frequent and repeated attacks, which leads to the deterioration on the navigation tasks and, often, a failure on a number of electronic devices for the ships’ wheelhouse.