A Novel Authentication Signal Component for Codeless Correlation

E. Gkougkas, M. Arizabaleta, T. Pany, B. Eissfeller

Abstract: The paper presents a new stand-alone signal component that provides authenticity for GNSS users. The concept behind the authentication signal is codeless correlation. The only prerequisite for the verification process is an already implemented navigation message authentication (NMA) component which verifies that the received signal is indeed transmitted from the space segment. The proposed authentication scheme is constructed by random spreading sequences. To ensure that these sequence are generated by the satellite, they carry on top of them navigation bits which are essential to prove the origin of the signal. The navigation bits are revealed by correlating time shifted versions of the random spreading sequences. The advantage of this scheme relies on the fact that the participating receiver adopting the verification process stores only samples, correlates them with an advanced in time sample batch, reads out the overlying symbol and verifies the symbol by an NMA concept. The high computational load of generating spreading code sequences using a seed which has to be verified firstly by an NMA concept and serves as initialization vector for a block or stream cipher is with the proposed concept bypassed. On the other hand, the performance of the codeless correlation cannot compete with the performance of a code-based correlation at low carrier to noise density ratios. Hence, the paper illustrates the differences between a conventional code-based and codeless based (cross-correlation) authentication component and how a stand-alone component can be designed for authentication purposes.
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation
January 28 - 31, 2019
Hyatt Regency Reston
Reston, Virginia
Pages: 423 - 434
Cite this article: Gkougkas, E., Arizabaleta, M., Pany, T., Eissfeller, B., "A Novel Authentication Signal Component for Codeless Correlation," Proceedings of the 2019 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Reston, Virginia, January 2019, pp. 423-434. https://doi.org/10.33012/2019.16701
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