Exploring Multi-Channel GPS Receivers for Detecting Spoofing Attacks on UAVs Using Machine Learning

All current transportation systems (vehicles, trucks, planes, etc.) rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) as their main navigation technology. GPS receivers collect signals from multiple satellites and are able to provide more or less accurate positioning. For civilian applications, GPS signals are sent without any encryption system. For this reason, they are vulnerable to various attacks, and the most prevalent one is known as GPS spoofing. The main consequence is the loss of position monitoring, which may increase damage risks in terms of crashes or hijacking. In this study, we focus on UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) positioning attacks. We first review numerous techniques for detecting and mitigating GPS spoofing attacks, finding that various types of attacks may occur. In the literature, many studies have focused on only one type of attack. We believe that targeting the study of many attacks is crucial for developing efficient mitigation mechanisms. Thus, we have explored a well-known datasetcontaining authentic UAV signals along with spoofed signals (with three types of attacked signals). As a main contribution, we propose a more interpretable approach to exploit the dataset by extracting individual mission sequences, handling non-stationary features, and converting the GPS raw data into a simplified structured format. Then, we design tree-based machine learning algorithms, namely decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), for the purpose of classifying signal types and to recognize spoofing attacks. Our main findings are as follows: (a) random forest has significant capability in detecting and classifying GPS spoofing attacks, outperforming the other models. (b) We have been able to detect most types of attacks and distinguish them.