A Deep-Learning-Based GPS Signal Spoofing Detection Method for Small UAVs

Abstract

The navigation of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) mainly depends on global positioning systems (GPSs). However, GPSs are vulnerable to attack by spoofing, which causes the UAVs to lose their positioning ability. To address this issue, we propose a deep learning method to detect the spoofing of GPS signals received by small UAVs. Firstly, we describe the GPS signal dataset acquisition and preprocessing methods; these include the hardware system of the UAV and the jammer used in the experiment, the time and weather conditions of the data collection, the use of Spearman correlation coefficients for preprocessing, and the use of SVM-SMOTE to solve the spoofing data imbalance. Next, we introduce a PCA-CNN-LSTM model. We used principal component analysis (PCA) of the model to extract feature information related to spoofing from the GPS signal dataset. The convolutional neural network (CNN) in the model was used to extract local features in the GPS signal dataset, and long short-term memory (LSTM) was used as a posterior module of the CNN for further processing and modeling. To minimize randomness and chance in the simulation experiments, we used the 10-fold cross-validation method to train and evaluate the computational performance of our spoofing machine learning model. We conducted a series of experiments in a numerical simulation environment and evaluated the proposed model against the most advanced traditional machine learning and deep learning models. The results and analysis show that the PCA-CNN-LSTM neural network model achieved the highest accuracy (0.9949). This paper provides a theoretical basis and technical support for spoofing detection for small-UAV GPS signals.