Telecom test and measurement (T&M) vendor Spirent Communications on Tuesday launched its software solution that concurrently simulates legitimate Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) constellations and spoofed or hoax signals to evaluate receiver resilience and help develop counter-measures.
Spirent says SimSAFE has been developed in association with Qascom, a vendor of GNSS signal security and authentication.
The company claims that SimSAFE is the first tool to help develop systems that will detect and counter spoofing attacks. This is significant as often affected receivers do not recognize when they are receiving fake signals and continue to operate normally, but provide false time or position information.
John Pottle, marketing director of Spirent’s Positioning Division, said: “This solution is unique in being able to provide a means of both emulating a spoof attack and monitoring a receiver under attack to evaluate mitigation strategies and countermeasures.”
SimSAFE is a fully controllable laboratory based, non-radiated test solution to evaluate a receiver’s response to a range of spoofing attacks.
The test tool generates simulated spoofing attacks that can be aligned with genuine signals from an antenna or locally generated genuine signals using a Spirent GNSS simulator. This allows users to simulate a wide range of sophisticated attacks, monitor the response of the receiver under attack and evaluate the effectiveness of proposed countermeasures to then improve resilience against such attacks.
