Assessment of a Low Power Offset BPSK Component for Spreading Code Authentication

In this paper a low power Spreading Code Authentication (SCA) sequence with a BPSK(1) modulation at a frequency offset of +7.161 MHz is tested for authentication purposes, the Galileo E1OS is used as base signal. The tested signals comprise a Galileo constellation with 5 satellites including the Galileo OS Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) and a low power offset BPSK (OBPSK(7,1)) as SCA component. The signals are generated with the software based MuSNAT-Signal-Generator. The generated signals were transmitted Over-The-Air (OTA) using a Software-Defined-Radio (SDR) as pseudolite. With a real-environment-testbed the performance of the SCA in real channel conditions (fading and multipath) was tested. A new SCA evaluation scheme is proposed and was implemented. Under real channel conditions we derive experimental threshold values for the new SCA evaluation scheme which allow a robust authentication. A Security Code Estimation and Replay (SCER) spoofing attack was mimicked on the real-environment-testbed and analyzed with the SCA evaluation scheme. It was shown that the usage of an OBPSK is feasible as an authentication method and can be used in combination with the OSNMA to improve the authentication robustness against Security SCER attacks.