Founding Entity: Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) – Innovation Center

Amount of the Founding: $ 12,000.00

Duration of the Project: 1 year

Lead Investigator: Dr. Gabriele Oligeri

 

We propose the design, development and implementation of a smartphone application featuring a GPS spoofing detection and mitigation technique exploiting the signals received by the mobile cellular network. Our application compares the information received from the GPS infrastructure with that one’s coming from the Base Stations (BSs) belonging to the mobile cellular network, its position being static and publicly available. We highlight that this approach represents a breakthrough in the current ICT landscape for its implementation simplicity and pervasive deployability. We already evaluated its effectiveness since we conducted a wide measurement campaign driving more than 150 km for about 10 hours, while gathering data from a real GSM infrastructure.

Our analysis proved that our solution can detect all the spoofing attacks while experiencing zero false positives and a detection delay of less than 115 seconds—that is, experiencing a maximal deviation from the planned path of just 1.75 Miles when traveling at 55Mph. Our proof-of-concept is the first of its type and it represents a world-wide opportunity to reaffirm the leadership of Qatar in the cybersecurity landscape. GPS spoofing represents a dreadful attack for big-event organization (like Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup) or more targeted attacks involving specific VIP, and surprisingly, so far, there is no effective solution that can hit the market as that one proposed by us.