GPS Swarm Spoofing: Theoretical Analysis and Practical Solutions

Although GPS spoofing of individual devices has been extensively examined, little systematic research on swarm spoofing has been conducted. In general, swarm missions may allow each device to navigate independently for different tasks, and it is much more complicated to build corresponding spoofing signals for such general cases. To address this issue, we formulate a general swarm spoofing method to explore the theoretical capabilities and limitations of common cases. We then propose a basic swarm spoofing model to show that, if we try to spoof each receiver precisely, we can only attack a small number of receivers (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\leq 9$</tex>) simultaneously in theory. However, in practice, we often need to deal with many receivers. Therefore, we develop a method that can spoof more receivers with acceptable errors. We present a method to construct spoofing messages and evaluate its effectiveness in practical settings with simulations. Although this work focuses on the GPS system, the proposed ideas can be applied to other GNSSs.