Click to read Richard Langley’s Innovation Insights column, “GNSS jamming and spoofing.”
Figure 1: GPSJAM map on March 23, 2024. The map is based on GPS accuracy reports fron aircraft broadcast digital radio messages (ADS-B) over a 24-h period. A vast (uncolored) area on the globe is not covered because of no ADS-B report. Arcs are drawn over part of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean to help visualize the cone of the interference coming from potential jamming power sources. (Photo: GPSJAM.org)
GPS services are critical for real-time information on positioning, navigation and time (PNT). Because of the highly accurate and continuous PNT solution provided by GPS in all weather conditions, this multi-use technology has been adopted for civil applications including some for transportation, agriculture, aviation and emergency services. The increasing societal dependence on GPS has also created a set of security vulnerabilities for these applications.
GPS applications are vulnerable to signal interference, spoofing and degraded or denied services. Both intentional — jamming — and unintentional signal interference can cause inaccurate PNT and poor navigation performance. In addition, GPS service may be intentionally degraded or disrupted during military operations and system testing. Environments in which the GPS service is unavailable or severely degraded require alternative solutions for PNT.
Several countermeasures have been implemented to mitigate the vulnerabilities of GPS receiving systems including flex power operation and signal encryption/authorization initiated by the service provider and signal filters and adaptive antennas implemented by a user. For example, a new military signal, M-code, from GPS III satellites has an improved anti-jamming capability in both the L1 and L2 frequency bands. GPS III can broadcast signals using a high-gain directional antenna, in addition to a wide-angle, full Earth antenna, which produces a restricted area spot service by manipulating signal strength. Such flex power operations help improve GPS performance in the presence of jamming. The flex power operation is different from the so-called Selective Availability (SA), which was an intentional degradation of civilian GPS signal accuracy globally. SA operation was discontinued in May 2000, so GPS services are always available for civil applications worldwide.
However, the transparency and openness of GPS services for peaceful uses is facing a hard reality, as the balance between peacetime and wartime applications can quickly change due to geopolitical conflicts. Attacking and overcoming GPS vulnerabilities has become a fast-evolving battlefield in modern electronic warfare. Jamming and spoofing of GPS — and other GNSS — have increased substantially in the eastern Mediterranean, Baltic Sea, and Arctic regions since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This was officially documented by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency in Safety Information Bulletin 2022-02R1 issued in November 2023.
For example, on March 23 to 24, 2024, widespread GPS jamming occurred in Eastern Europe that impacted more than 1,600 aircraft over a period of two days and was widely reported by mass media. The source of this massive jamming event was thought to be in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave between Lithuania and Poland. As shown in FIGURE 1, the panoramic cone in the jammed region appears to support this speculation. Similar events with large-scale jamming occurred on December 25 to 26, 2023; January 19, February 2, 12 and 14; and March 1 to 3, 13, 15 to 16 and 18, 2024, according to GPSJAM.org. In addition, Figure 1 reveals a wide area of jamming in the eastern Mediterranean where the Israel-Hamas and Israel-Hezbollah conflicts are taking place.
The increased level of GPS jamming has had a significant impact on global science observations over the conflict regions, including low-quality measurements for soil moisture, and atmospheric and ionospheric soundings, as reported in the March issue of GPS World. In addition, NASA has observed many more dropouts from in-orbit GPS receivers in recent years, which degraded the ephemeris information used for scientific data. As the pattern of apparent GPS jamming continues, alternative filtering of the spaceflight GPS data would be required to safeguard continuous science operations.
The study reported in this article aims to provide a global perspective on recent GPS jamming and degraded services. Since late 2019, commercial CubeSat constellations such as Spire have provided atmospheric measurements with much-needed global coverage and spatiotemporal sampling. The amount of GNSS data increased from about 7,000 observations per day in 2020 to about 20,000 per day in 2022 thanks to the observation demand from weather and climate research.
Table 1: Spire satellite groups and GPS satellites observed.
SPIRE CUBESAT CONSTELLATION
Spire Global has flown more than 100 Low Earth Multi-Use Receiver (LEMUR) CubeSats since 2014. These cost-effective CubeSats are used to track maritime, aviation and weather activity from space, and can be replenished at a relatively fast pace for a low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation. TABLE 1 lists the Spire CubeSats used in this study, showing their orbital inclination, flight model ID and the tracked GPS pseudorandom noise (PRN) code ID. Spire receivers track GPS L1C/A and L2 signals for precise orbit determination (POD) and radio occultation (RO) measurements with 1-Hz and 50-Hz sampling respectively. These Spire POD and RO data collections — from November 2019 to the present — are part of a contract under NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition Program.
Figure 2: A schematic of the Spire 3-unit (10 x 10 x 34 cm) LEMUR CubeSat showing a zenith-view POD (precise orbit determination) and a limb-view RO (radio occultation) antenna for GPS measurements. There are usually two RO antennas on the fore-and-aft line with respect to the flight velocity, but only one POD antenna is mounted at the top. (Photo: Dong L. Wu)
The Spire LEMUR spacecraft have gone through several generations and expanded capabilities from atmospheric sounding with GPS radio occultation (GPS-RO) to GPS reflectometry (GPS-R) for soil moisture and ocean winds, grazing-angle reflectometry (GPS-GR) for sea ice and GPS-POD ionospheric sounding for space weather. In essence, however, as illustrated in FIGURE 2, these measurements are made available from two types of antennas on the satellites: a low-gain POD antenna and a high-gain RO antenna. As the measurement capability and performance improved, these antenna designs have become increasingly sophisticated and may differ substantially from satellite to satellite. Thus, it is imperative to characterize these antenna patterns carefully before comparing their signal amplitude or signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
Figure 3: POD antenna patterns derived empirically from Spire FM124 and FM128 data as a function of elevation and azimuth angles. The elevation angle is defined as the angle of GPS line-of-sight (LOS) above the spacecraft horizon. The azimuth angle is defined as the difference between GPS LOS and spacecraft velocity azimuth angles with respect to the north. A 5° x 5° bin size was used in the averaging. Colors are the mean L1 SNR in arbitrary unit from two-month data aggregation. The antenna patterns of L1 and L2 signals are assumed to be same.
Instead of using ground calibration data, we employed an empirical method using the flight data to derive Spire’s POD antenna patterns. For each CubeSat, we aggregated a few months of POD data according to the GPS-POD link direction, in terms of elevation angle and azimuth angle with respect to the satellite flight direction. The averaging of such a large ensemble of measurements allows us to smooth out the fluctuations due to ionospheric scintillations and GPS service power variations. Two examples illustrated in FIGURE 3 show drastically different antenna patterns and designs between Spire FM124 and FM128. The larger antenna gain values at high positive elevation angles are expected for the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) planar POD antenna pointing at zenith, whereas the gain at the bottom of negative elevation angle range is an added feature in this antenna design to enable a limb sounding of ionospheric electron density. To monitor the GPS service power, we use only the SNR measurements at positive elevation angles greater than 30° using the antenna pattern normalized by the mean values in this angular range.
We analyzed both Spire POD and RO SNR data. The POD SNR data are used to determine the GPS service power, while the RO SNR data are used to estimate the jamming power or jammer-to-noise ratio (JNR) from the surface. The POD SNR data at high elevation angles are mostly from free space but need to be corrected for the antenna pattern effect to measure the GPS signal strength accurately. Depending on the GPS-POD link direction, the antenna pattern can cause a large variation in the observed SNR (see Figure 3). For JNR detection, we use the RO SNR data from very low elevation angles (lower than 0°) with a straight-line height (HSL) of less than -140 kilometers. At this height, a tracked GPS satellite is completely obscured by Earth and the RO receiver is essentially measuring the receiver system’s noise. Thus, any enhanced “noise” would be considered as a jamming signal. The RO antenna pattern is less critical in this case because the locations of ground jamming sources are unknown and their signals are weak at spacecraft altitudes. Roughly speaking, the RO antennas tend to acquire signals within a horizontal field of view (FOV) of 60°, corresponding roughly to a swath of about 1,800 kilometers at the surface. Therefore, the RO JNR has a coarse spatial resolution and represents a collective emission from the ground sources.
DEGRADED SERVICE AND JAMMING
To monitor GPS service power, we normalized the Spire POD SNR with the empirically calculated antenna pattern for each CubeSat. The normalized SNR data are averaged to produce a global monthly map and then annual maps (see FIGURE 4). The L1 and L2 SNRs from Spire represent an average GPS power at an orbital altitude of about 530 kilometers. The normalized SNRs are geo-registered using the CubeSat location where the measurement was made.
Variations between different GPS satellites as well as between different Spire CubeSat altitudes are neglected in this study. Broadcasting powers from the GPS satellites may differ by a small (about 10%) amount between PRNs, which manifest themselves as a slightly inhomogeneous distribution in the maps (see Figure 4). The impacts of the Spire orbital altitude on the estimated GPS power are small, compared to the regional GPS power reduction seen over Europe.
Further improvements can be made to produce a more accurate estimate of the GPS power as well as a time series of power changes from individual PRNs.
There is a clear GPS power reduction in the L1 and L2 signals over several targeted regions. The reduction appears to differ between L1 and L2 bands during the 2020 to 2023 interval. The most prominent power reduction regions are Europe and the Middle East, where the L2 reduction started as early as 2020. Although the L1 reduction is present in this region, it deepened after 2021 and perhaps widened more in 2022 and 2023. The degraded services for a targeted region are consistent with the new capability of GPS III in operation.
Figure 4: Annual mean GPS L1 (top panel) and L2 (bottom panel) SNR distributions observed by Spire POD receivers for 2020-2023. (Photo: Dong L. Wu)
A relatively small GPS power reduction can be found in East China and Southeast Asia in the 2020 to 2023 period. The L1 power reduction in this region reveals a shift from Southeast Asia in 2019 to East China in 2023, whereas the L2 reduction appears to be concentrated in East China during these years. While geopolitical tensions in this region did not escalate to any wars, electronic warfare operations have been widely reported over the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and the Philippines since 2017.
Jamming detection from space is a more challenging task because of the generally weak JNR at the height of orbiting receivers. In addition, a wide antenna FOV of GPS receivers could yield less accurate geolocation of jamming sources. However, jamming detection has been made from several LEO satellites by various teams of scientists and engineers. By tracking the front-end noise of an RO receiver on the MetOp satellite, researchers were able to detect the elevated noise power originating from ground-based sources. Also, using the radio frequency spectra recorded with a nadir-viewing receiver on the International Space Station, investigators demonstrated the feasibility of detecting jamming and spoofing signals from the ground. It has been shown that the location of jamming/spoofing sources can be pinned down accurately with observations from two satellites. This technique laid the foundation for a new class of space intelligence missions such as the DEEP prototype, STRATOS and HawkEye-360. Studying the SNR perturbations in POD data from GRACE and COSMIC-1/2, it was possible to generate global maps of jamming hotspots from 2007 to 2016. Investigators have made use of the enhanced noise in delay Doppler maps of down-looking GPS-R receivers for jamming detection. Recently, we analyzed GPS-RO SNR measurements at the tangent heights obscured by Earth and reported the increased level of jamming in northern Africa, the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean after 2018.
Compared to nadir-view techniques, jamming detection from limb views has some advantages and disadvantages. Disadvantages have been associated with the long path length between the source and the receiver, resulting in a potentially weak JNR and poor geolocation of jamming sources. On the other hand, if jammers chose to radiate the power horizontally for a wide areal impact, it would allow limb-view sensors to pick up the jamming power and identify the directionality of jamming sources by comparing the JNR observed from opposite look angles.
FIGURE 5 As in Fig. 4 but the L1 and L2 JNR are derived from the Spire RO SNR measurements at HSL < -140 km. A 3 V/V background noise is subtracted from the SNR measurements to obtain the JNR. In 2023 the white region inside the enhanced jamming is caused by the quality control (QC) of Spire data processing that excluded the RO data with a low free-space SNR. (Photo: Dong L. Wu)
Without any sophisticated data processing, in the study for this article, we simply averaged all the RO L1 SNR data at HSL less than 140 kilometers to extract the JNR power by subtracting a 3 V/V (volts per volt) noise from the average (see FIGURE 5). This approach is slightly different from our previous study, which normalized the JNR by the free-space SNR. Because the JNR signals were so strong in 2020 to 2023, no normalization is needed to enhance the jamming detection.
It is not surprising to see in Figure 5 that the worst GPS-jammed region appears in the Middle East and the surrounding area where geopolitical conflicts have broken out frequently in recent years. In the Syria and Libya civil wars, as well as in the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts, low-cost UAVs (commonly referred to as drones) and precision-guided munitions were widely used in attacks, which was a major incentive to deploy electronic warfare to jam GPS-guided weapons and operations.
As shown in Figure 5, the JNR power was mostly concentrated in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and northern Africa in 2020 and 2021 but spread to northern Europe after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. More JNR power appears to be in the GPS L2 band compared to L1, likely because L2 is a weaker signal and easier to jam and degrade GPS performance in navigation applications.
The regions of GPS signal reduction and enhanced jamming are highly correlated in the Spire observations. The high correlation is expected for the increased use of militarized commercial drones and GPS-guided munitions in the conflict zones. In the Russia-Ukraine war, low-cost GPS-based commercial drones have been imported to the battlefield, as have jamming capabilities. Their modifications and tactical use are evolving rapidly as the conflict continues. A precursor of such massive use of low-cost drones was in the Libya civil war (2014 – 2020), in which thousands of airstrikes were reported. Most of these commercial-grade drones relied on GPS civilian signals for navigation. Therefore, denying or reducing the GPS civilian signal power can help degrade the performance of militarized commercial drones. On the other hand, jamming and spoofing GPS signals remains a cost-effective electronic warfare technique in these conflicts.
CONCLUSIONS
This article has provided an overview of global GPS jamming and service reduction between 2020 and 2023 using recent observations from the Spire constellation. The service power reduction and jamming power increases are highly correlated on a regional scale, showing that Europe and the Middle East have been most impacted by the ongoing geopolitical conflicts. The area of the impacted regions has widened significantly from 2021 to 2023 and spread to Northern Europe. The dual-use civil and military GPS technology and services are currently experiencing an unprecedented scale of electronic warfare attacks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work reported in this article was supported by NASA’s Commercial Smallsat Data Acquisition program.
The post Innovation: Recent GPS jamming in regions of geopolitical conflict first appeared on GPS World.
