Papers for

gnss receiver engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Software-defined radio verifies secure satellite positioning watermark

Performance Characterization of Pulsar's Software-defined Watermark Verifier

Abstract: Pulsar provides the world's most secure PNT service by incorporating a Combinatorial Watermark into its ranging service. Under conservative signal conditions, Pulsar's Combinatorial Watermark, where 21 ranging code chips are inverted among the 1023, provides 32-bit authentication security each second. In this work, we present our software-defined radio (SDR) implementation of the Pulsar watermark processor. We discuss various threat models, multiple receiver architectures, implications to the receiver, and results from using Pulsar's SDR processing watermarked signals daily from the Pulsar-0 mission. Our results demonstrate the feasible implementation of Pulsar's watermark verification process in commercial GNSS receivers. This is an important milestone in making Xona's Pulsar service available to customers later this year after deployment of our first four production satellites.

Wed 14 OctCryptography and Security
The gist
Satellite navigation systems need ways to confirm their signals are authentic to prevent spoofing or fake signals. The authors show how a special watermark embedded in Pulsar's satellite signals can be checked using software-defined radios, making it possible to verify signal authenticity in real-time. Their experiments with live data from early Pulsar satellites prove this verification can work in commercial receivers. This advances secure satellite positioning by showing a practical method to ensure trustworthy timing and location services.
Open → 2610.20827v1