The European Space Agency (ESA)-funded BREGO project (‘Block-box for an optimized GNSS spectrum monitoring network using AI’), carried out by Spanish technology company GMV, has developed a new system for real-time jamming and spoofing detection, classification and mitigation.
The system employs optimized signal processing techniques driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms.
The vulnerability of GNSS technologies is well known. A relatively low-power signal means GNSS signals can be nullified by jamming, while the openness of the signal structures, specifically GPS L1 and E1, make the technology vulnerable to spoofing, wherein false signals are substituted for genuine ones.
Speaking at a recent presentation hosted by ESA, GMV GNSS Engineer Wahyudin Syam explained the rationale behind the BREGO project: “GNSS receivers are deployed around the world and in many domains, providing position, velocity and time information for safety-critical, liability-critical, commercial and other applications. Our aim is to provide resilient navigation in environments dominated by GNSS threats.
“We started with a review of the state of the art for GNSS threats, detection and mitigation techniques, and we considered technical specifications and the various trade-offs.” A set of AI, ML, digital signal processing-based algorithms were modeled and tested, after an in-house dataset was used to train the algorithms for jamming and spoofing detection and classification.
Solid work
BREGO created a ‘block-box’ hardware setup, comprising an external radio frequency-to-radio frequency device for enhancing any consumer-grade, off-the-shelf GNSS receiver. Key system elements include a high-performance PC with a USRP X410, multi-channel, software-defined radio front end, and a Septentrio GPS L1 and Galileo E1 receiver.
The system was tested at GMV’s UK laboratory against simulated and TEXBAT (Texas Spoofing Test Battery) datasets. The TEXBAT dataset is a publicly available collection of recorded spoofing scenarios for evaluating GNSS authentication techniques. A separate testing and validation campaign was carried out at ESA’s ESTEC facility in the Netherlands, using data gathered at the 2024 Jammertest event in Norway, which involved a series of staged spoofing and jamming attacks.
“The block-box system is receiver agnostic and its effectiveness has been validated,” said Syam. “It is flexible and configurable and provides effective interference mitigation for both chirp and CDMA-based interference attacks in real-time, laying the groundwork for broader GNSS applications.” The project also developed a variant of an adaptive notch filter, mitigating rapidly changing interference without causing nonlinear phase distortions.
The BREGO project was funded under ESA’s NAVISP program, supporting technology innovation in the European PNT sector.
