GNSS Receiver Fingerprinting Based on Time Skew of Embedded CSAC Clock

Abstract

GNSS spoofing has become a significant security vulnerability threatening remote sensing systems. Hardware fingerprint-based GNSS receiver identification is one of the solutions to address this security issue. However, existing research has not provided a solution for distinguishing GNSS receivers of the same specification. This paper first theoretically proves that the CSACs (Chip-Scale Atomic Clocks) used in GNSS receivers have unique hardware noise and then proposes a fingerprinting scheme based on this hardware noise. Experiments based on the neural network method demonstrate that this fingerprint achieved an identification accuracy of 94.60% for commercial GNSS receivers of the same specification and performed excellently in anomaly detection, confirming the robustness of the fingerprinting method. This method shows a new real-time GNSS security monitoring method based on CSACs and can be easily used with any commercial GNSS receivers.