CoSAA: The Cockpit Spoofing Alert App for Electronic Flight Bags - Concept and Simulation

As the issue of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) spoofing grows in commercial aviation, this contribution introduces an en-route service application called CoSAA, the Cockpit Spoofing Alert App, for pilots of civil commercial airplanes. CoSAA detects spoofing events before the operational avionics are affected and warns the operators. The app runs on the pilots Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) and monitors GNSS signals in real-time to detect spoofing threats before they affect operational avionics. CoSAA primarily utilizes data from an external handheld GNSS receiver, which is commonly available in many cockpits, but can also integrate additional information from internal sensors or the aircraft bus. The app detects GNSS spoofing by applying a set of detection metrics, which are divided into position and parameter metrics, onto the live streaming data. The metrics include consistency analysis, jump detectors and statistical testing on the different data layers. The implementation of the first set of metrics shows a very promising result. During a simulation with a real-world recorded data set with spoofing signals the metrics were able to detect the attack approximately 15 min before the operational avionic systems were affected.