5G NON-TERRESTRIAL NETWORK SECURE TWO-WAY RANGING FOR LEO SATELLITES (ARTES 4.0 SPL 5G/6G 3F.022)

Description

Study, design and validate a secure two-way ranging protocol relying on 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) in LEO.Targeted Improvements:Enable secure two-way ranging via future LEO 5G satcom services for target applications such as IoT sensors.Description:All GNSS systems are principally based on one-way ranging and as such they are fundamentally vulnerable to spoofing and/or meaconing attacks, even in the presence of GNSS security mechanisms such as navigation message authentication or signal authentication. Over the last decade, secure two-way ranging techniques at physical layer have matured for short-distance terrestrial applications, includingstandardisation and commercial deployments based on rigorous security analysis. More recent work has proposed the utilisation of 5GNew Radio (NR) waveforms to implement such secure two-way ranging techniques on the basis of 5G 3GPP terrestrial networks. Such techniques when periodically applied could assist GNSS receivers in eliminating even the most complex spoofing/meaconing attacks such as ab-initio (a.k.a. cold-start) spoofing but are today preconditioned to the existence of terrestrial 5G NR connectivity. For applications such as IoT in remote locations without terrestrial 5G connectivity, LEO satellite based 5G networks could offer an alternative solution. This activity shall analyse different 5G LEO satellite scenarios (transparent payload, regenerative payload or direct access to mobile) to determine whether the 5G NR waveforms which are considered for these NTN communication use cases could additionally support secure 2-way ranging. The study shall also demonstrate secure 2-way ranging in a testbed by implementing such5G NR waveforms.

Tender Specifics