GPS has become fairly common in our everyday lives, not only able to pinpoint our locations on Earth but also as an incredibly accurate timekeeping method. But since these satellites are around 20,000 km above Earth, the received signals on the surface of the planet can be incredibly weak. This makes them prone to jamming and spoofing, a weakness of the technology that has long been known. Although attempts to mitigate these problems have been ongoing, there has recently been a large-scale attempt to interfere with these signals that put all mitigation efforts to the test.
One proposed way to improve resilience is to supplement existing GNSS systems with low-Earth-orbit navigation satellites. In this example, a company called Xona is using a satellite called Pulsar-0 that operates in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and provides positioning and timing signals that are around 100 times stronger than standard signals from GPS/GNSS satellites. It is able to receive GPS signals as well, ensuring the two systems agree on one another. And, because Pulsar’s navigation signals originate from LEO and are much stronger than conventional GNSS signals, Xona expects them to be significantly more resistant to jamming.
Beyond geopolitics, spoofing GPS has some applications in finding legendaries in Pokemon Go as well as making it fairly trivial to steal GPS-guided drones.
Maybe let the satellites form a mesh network and have a global time based key tied to the position and designation of the satellite itself, akin to multifactor authentication, satellites nearby provide details of their neighbours and they need to tally up, so to spoof it, you’d need to fake several signals at the same time. Sure, it doesn’t stop a man in the middle in space or some sort of denial of service, but it would be more robust than a simple set of beacons with known locations.
They already fake several signals at a time to spoof GPS – they simulate multiple satellites, otherwise it wouldn’t cause a notable change in location.
Why not mention Galileo authentication for the public??
Do your research HAD https://www.u-blox.com/en/technologies/osnma-galileo-spoofing
I thought one can cross-reference all four, GPS, Magellan, Glonass, Beidou, no?
Oops, wrong autocarrot, sorry, that was not Magellan but rather Galileo.