• Greg Wolff - Product Line Management, Microchip

Security has become the most important requirement for critical infrastructure operations. Any device connected to critical infrastructure can become a target for exploitation and needs to be as secure as possible.

Targeting network connected devices with cyber-attacks is a well-known attack vector, even understood by the typical user of mobile devices and computers. However, the rapid growth of using position, navigation and time (PNT) delivered by GNSS has become a new “invisible utility” used in our daily lives that has also become a new threat vector from the sky. Like network security threats, new GNSS vulnerabilities are on the rise and these threats come in many forms. Sky based threats generally referred to as jamming and spoofing can come in varying levels of complexity and can be intentional or unintentional threats such as satellite errors, environmental effects and weather anomalies. Given the low power level of the GNSS signal, a situation of havoc for PNT delivered GNSS is now considered imminent by national agencies across the globe. With all the concern surrounding this new threat, at the technical level, exactly how are GNSS signals disrupted? What do these signal anomalies look like? This paper will discuss the growing range of GNSS threats and provide examples of the types of signal characteristics that threaten PNT data delivered by GNSS.