GNSS Positioning Under Threat: The Rising Risk to Existing Systems and The Role of Alternative Indoor and Seamless Navigation Technologies

What began with isolated incidents of GPS interference has grown into a global crisis that threatens everything from commercial aviation to military operations. This paper documents the alarming reality and the importance of GNSS-denied navigation technologies in this context. GNSS attacks have increased sevenfold in contested regions, rendering precision-guided weapons nearly useless and forcing airlines to abandon entire routes. The availability of some inexpensive jammers (less than $50) has meant that the devices used by countries can be easily acquired by anyone, significantly compromising security. We present an investigation of this escalating threat through numerous comprehensive real-world case studies, including air traffic chaos over the Baltic Sea, maritime spoofing in international waters and the failure of precision weapons in active conflict zones. In addition, we share an 819-minute open-source dataset of experimental GNSS raw data, featuring three different types of attacks on a GNSS receiver under various motion conditions. The analysis of the main impact of these attacks on the raw measurements at the receiver level and a summary of the footprint of each attack based on the measurements is also provided. Finally we explain how the positioning and navigation solutions developed for indoors offer decisive advantages for mitigating these attacks, solving outdoor navigation vulnerabilities. This research shows that the future of secure navigation lies not in hardening satellite systems, but in making them optional.