SAFE: Secure Symbiotic Positioning, Navigation, and Timing
Md Sadman Siraj, Eirini Eleni Tsiropoulou, Symeon Papavassiliou, Jim Plusquellic · 2023
Increasing the security and robustness of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) systems is a critical issue towards exploiting the PNT service at its full capacity. In this paper, we treat the joint problem of designing a secure and robust alternative PNT solution that supports the targets' PNT services, while simultaneously detecting and ejecting malicious nodes from the system that aim at deteriorating the proposed PNT solution's accuracy. The overall problem is formulated as a non-cooperative game among the targets and other collaborator nodes in order to jointly minimize their personal experienced positioning and timing error, as well as the overall system's error. The theory of potential games is adopted to prove the existence of at least one Pure Nash Equilibrium (PNE), while a log-linear-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is proposed to enable the targets and collaborators to determine such a PNE. A detailed analysis for attack detection is presented considering both single-attack and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack scenarios, where the malicious collaborators can fake their coordinates and their transmission power, while an overall PNT methodology including their ejection from the system is outlined. The performance evaluation of the proposed approach is achieved via modeling and simulation.