Practical Spoofing Attacks on Galileo Open Service Navigation Message Authentication

TL;DR

This paper uncovers critical vulnerabilities in Galileo OSNMA, demonstrating practical spoofing attacks that can manipulate navigation signals and deceive receivers into false locations, validated through real-world experiments.

Contribution

It is the first to identify and demonstrate practical spoofing attacks exploiting ATS and IMA vulnerabilities in Galileo OSNMA.

Findings

All proposed attacks successfully bypass OSNMA verification.

The TSF attack can spoof receiver locations arbitrarily.

Real-world experiments confirm attack effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper examines the Galileo Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) and, for the first time, discovers two critical vulnerabilities, namely artificially-manipulated time synchronization (ATS) and interruptible message authentication (IMA). ATS allows attackers falsify a receiver's signals and/or local reference time (LRT) while still fulfilling the time synchronization (TS) requirement. IMA allows temporary interruption of the navigation data authentication process due to the reception of a broken message (probably caused by spoofing attacks) and restores the authentication later. By exploiting the ATS vulnerability, we propose a TS-comply replay (TSR) attack with two variants (real-time and non-real-time), where attackers replay signals to a victim receiver while strictly complying with the TS rule. We further propose a TS-comply forgery (TSF) attack, where attackers first use a previously-disclosed key to forge a message based on the OSNMA protocol, then tamper with the vitcim receiver's LRT correspondingly to comply with the TS rule and finally transmit the forged message to the receiver. Finally, we propose a concatenating replay (CR) attack based on the IMA vulnerability, where attackers concatenate replayed signals to the victim receiver's signals in a way that still enables correct verification of the navigation data in the replayed signals. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks, we conduct real-world experiments with a commercial Galileo receiver manufactured by Septentrio, two software-defined radio (SDR) devices, open-source Galileo-SDR-SIM and OSNMAlib software. The results showed that all the attacks can successfully pass the OSNMA scheme and the TSF attack can spoof receivers to arbitrary locations.