Location Verification for Spoofing Detection in Non-Terrestrial Networks

Reliable location awareness is essential for the development of new services and applications in non-terrestrial networks (NTN). The ability of malicious users to report false location information poses a significant threat to NTN performance. This threat introduces the need for a flexible and robust location verification system (LVS) that can reliably detect malicious users. This paper proposes a single-satellite LVS based on round-trip time and angle-of-arrival measurements. We characterize several sources of uncertainty unique to the NTN scenario and examine their combined effect on positioning error. To detect spoofing probabilistically, we approximate the likelihood function for the unknown user position using a Gaussian mixture model and employ a likelihood ratio decision rule for location verification. Results display receiver operating characteristic curves to evaluate the LVS performance under various satellite ephemeris error conditions, spoofing distances, number of measurements available to the system, and wireless channel properties. The proposed LVS is shown to reliably detect spoofing among malicious users.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Schatz, Ensign Nathan Caleb

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Win, Moe Z.
• Ricard, Michael J.

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/162967

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/162967