A Detection and Weakening Method for GNSS Time-Synchronization Attacks

In human society, the normal operation of important infrastructures, such as the power system, communication system, and computer network depend on the precise time provided by stationary satellite timing receivers, which are vulnerable to a kind of spoofing interference called time-synchronization attack. The aim of the attacks is to change the time provided by receivers to other systems, resulting in system disorders. This paper presents a time-synchronization attack detection and weakening method to solve this problem. The proposed method can estimate the binomial model parameters of receiver clock bias and the clock bias attack values at all observation instants by solving an optimization problem. Once the existence of the attacks is detected, the estimated clock bias attack values are used to correct the clock bias, so as to weaken the time-synchronization attacks. According to the numerical simulation results and analysis, we find that the proposed method outperforms other algorithms mentioned in this paper. Because it can not only realize real-time detection, but also greatly weaken the impact of time-synchronization attacks, making the attacks almost invalid.