Galileo Open Service Navigation Message Authentication: Preparation Phase and Drivers for Future Service Provision

Abstract

INTRODUCTION"Reality or fake news?"-A question of our time, not only of crucial importance for the users of social media, but also increasingly relevant within the world of GNSS. Navigation users rely on GNSS as a ubiquitous utility and need to trust that received navigation message data is truly coming from the GNSS system. The standard GNSS receiver will often not be able to detect any attempt of insidious misguidance by falsified GNSS data from a fake GNSS signal.In November 2020, Galileo became the first GNSS system to broadcast authentication data in an Open Service signal enabling the GNSS user to verify the authenticity of received navigation message data. This marked a first step towards the implementation of a new Galileo Open Service feature named Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA), which is planned to be offered free-of-charge to all Galileo Open Service users world-wide. It will both protect the user receiver from malicious data spoofing attacks and prevent the user from

Quantum-secured time transfer between precise timing facilities: a field trial with simulated satellite links

“…However, spoofing of the GNSS signals is a current issue for many satellite positioning systems (Ceccato et al 2018), and these types of attack could poison the data at the source. As of now, this is avoided by using the Galileo satellite network, which uses Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA), which provides stronger authentication methods than other systems, such as GPS (Götzelmann et al 2023); furthermore, integrity and consistency checks are performed in the GNSS data, alongside the use of multi-array antennas to reduce spoofing and jamming. In the future, QKD satellites could be integrated into the network to also authenticate this part of the signal (Dai et al 2020).…”

An Experimental Performance Assessment of Galileo OSNMA

“…Despite OSNMA being a relatively new and modern technology still in its test phase, there is already relevant literature related to it encompassing both theoretical work [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ] and practical performance assessments [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. In addition to this, there are a few open-source implementations of the OSNMA protocol [ 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 ], and some companies already support it in some of their products, such as Septentrio [ 26 ].…”

RTK+OSNMA Positioning for Road Applications: An Experimental Performance Analysis in Finland

“…Since its conception and proposition, Galileo’s OSNMA has undergone a testing, analysis and refinement process [ 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ], including a seven-month duration internal preparation phase started on November 2020 [ 15 ] and a public observation phase since November 2021. In the public observation phase, interested parties were invited to implement the service following the interface control documents (ICDs) and receiver guidelines [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ], and to perform tests and report the observed performance.…”

“…In the public observation phase, interested parties were invited to implement the service following the interface control documents (ICDs) and receiver guidelines [ 16 , 17 , 18 , 19 ], and to perform tests and report the observed performance. Since then, several open source implementations of the OSNMA protocol have emerged [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ], and numerous scientific studies have been published discussing its implementation and analyzing its overall performance [ 13 , 15 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ].…”

“…All in all, this limited satellite availability results in a decreased positioning performance with respect to what could otherwise be achieved. In the future, however, OSNMA might also authenticate GPS satellites [ 15 ], and GPS is also expected to deploy its own signal authentication scheme [ 38 ]. In this context, relevant questions are what is the performance that OSNMA-authenticated, RTK-based positioning offers now and what could be the one in that future.…”