- Category: Space Y News
- 2025-11-07
Episodes of GNSS signal jamming and spoofing are increasingly affecting civil aviation. These attacks aim to hide or alter an aircraft’s position from pilots and operators, posing serious threats to the safety of both private and commercial flights.
Developing and certifying anti-spoofing and anti-jamming solutions require long timelines and significant investments, as well as overcoming challenges related to technical complexity and regulatory requirements.
Spirent provides training and solutions for the civil aviation sector to assess jamming and spoofing risks in real time, respond effectively to attacks, and test system resilience and the performance of anti-jamming and anti-spoofing tools.
The civil aviation sector is particularly vulnerable to GNSS disruptions
GNSS jamming in aviation refers to the deliberate attempt to interfere with an aircraft’s signal to block or disrupt the reception of GNSS signals. GNSS spoofing, on the other hand, falsifies signals by imitating trusted ones, thereby providing pilots and aircraft operators with incorrect information about the aircraft’s position.
All signals transmitted from space can be jammed or spoofed, including those received by mobile phones. However, while mobile devices can function without GNSS, airlines, airports, and air traffic managers rely heavily on satellite signals for navigation and timing, making them especially vulnerable to GNSS disruptions.
Systems that are critical to aviation safety, such as flight management, ground warning, and communication or navigation systems, can be misled by false signals (spoofing), leading to incorrect positioning, misleading alerts, and potentially hazardous flight decisions.
In recent years, flights operating near conflict zones have experienced an increasing number of spoofing and jamming attacks. These not only affect aircraft while they are within critical areas but can even continue to cause malfunctions after leaving those zones, posing serious safety risks to aviation operations worldwide. Moreover, beyond impacting aviation operators, spoofing and jamming can also disrupt related infrastructure, like mobile networks that rely on GNSS timing.
Unlike the military sector, civil aviation has invested relatively little in protections against spoofing and jamming. Today, real-time data on these attacks is limited and often relies on public sources, which are not designed to determine their underlying causes.
To address spoofing and jamming, the civil aviation sector urgently needs to develop and test new equipment and systems, a process that is costly, time-consuming, and fraught with technical and administrative challenges.
Spirent provides up-to-date data, equipment and training to help the civil aviation sector increase its resilience to GNSS disruptions
Developing and testing new equipment to make civil aviation fully resilient to jamming and spoofing will take years. In the meantime, some companies are working to accelerate this process and support the sector in addressing immediate challenges.
Spirent Communications is a UK-based company specialising in communications and navigation testing. Among its activities, the company provides solutions for real-time, purpose-built monitoring and analysis of GNSS interference and spoofing.
Spirent offers solutions to aircraft manufacturers and suppliers to test receivers and systems, understand vulnerabilities to jamming and spoofing, proactively assess risks, evaluate mitigation strategies, upgrade receivers with anti-spoofing capabilities, and ultimately enhance overall aircraft system resilience.
In addition, Spirent provides air traffic operators, pilots, planners, dispatchers, and system integrators with accurate, up-to-date, high-resolution data on where and when interference occurs and its potential impacts. The company also offers training for pilots and air traffic operators on GNSS systems and how to respond in the event of signal disruptions.
The data can be accessed online and visualised on a computer screen or on the pilot’s connected tablet, alongside other information, such as weather and air traffic.
Enhancing aviation safety through multi-source aircraft monitoring
Spirent provides the civil aviation sector with essential data, expertise and training to assess and respond to GNSS signal disruptions. Tests conducted by Spirent have enabled several aircraft manufacturers and operators to strengthen the resilience of their fleets against jamming and spoofing.
Thanks to training and real-time data integrated into their information systems, pilots are made aware of the expected impacts of jamming or spoofing attacks and of the actions they can take to mitigate them.
In addition, real-time data on jamming and spoofing episodes, collected by Spirent from multiple sources, allows aviation authorities to provide special handling for aircraft affected by signal disruptions even after they leave a spoofed zone. Similarly, Spirent’s aircraft monitoring can alert maintenance teams to residual issues, helping to minimise delays while repairs are carried out on spoofed equipment.
These solutions help civil aviation operators, equipment manufacturers, and avionics suppliers enhance situational awareness, improve safety of life, and prepare for the next generation of navigation technologies.
Future directions in GNSS resilience and aviation safety
Some countries are already deploying dedicated monitoring systems at airports to enhance situational awareness. By combining multiple data sources, including inputs from mobile operators, governments, and other stakeholders, confidence in air navigation and safety systems is expected to increase significantly in the future.
Regarding ongoing advancements, Spirent has been among the first companies to enable testing of the Galileo Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA), a service that ensures the authenticity of the Galileo signals and is now available to the civil sector. Once integrated into commercial aircraft, this system will provide protection against spoofing attacks.
In the meantime, Spirent is seeking to leverage all available signals from space to ensure GNSS signal resilience and reliability. As part of its strategy, the company is also exploring alternative PNT (Positioning, Navigation, Timing) solutions that do not rely solely on satellites.
Finally, Spirent aims to strengthen collaboration across industries that rely on GNSS, such as aviation, automotive, and telecommunications, to increase resilience against jamming and spoofing attacks. This includes improving authentication, encryption, and signal diversity, developing more effective methods to address GNSS threats, characterising received signals to better understand risks, and building a comprehensive database of GNSS threat scenarios.
These capabilities will enable stakeholders to design, test, and certify more resilient navigation systems across multiple industries.
Intended users
- Civil aviation sector
- Private aircraft operators
- Commercial aviation operators
- Airports
- Air traffic managers
- Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM)
- Air equipment suppliers
To know more, read the Spirent E-Book “Protecting commercial aircraft against GPS spoofing threats” and visit the Spirent website at: https://www.spirent.com/
