130: Robust GNSS Tracker for Sensitive Applications

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards system is designed to verify States’ legal undertakings to use nuclear material for exclusively peaceful purposes. States declare their nuclear material and activities to the IAEA, and the IAEA verifies the correctness and completeness of these declarations.

This requires robust and resilient GNSS trackers which can withstand sophisticated attacks (jamming, spoofing, and especially treacherous meaconing) and tampering attempts by State-level actors, providing Assured PNT (Trusted positioning data).

The GNSS tracker shall be battery powered and capable of unsupervised operations. 

In previous projects (in particular, EL1-077) building blocks for this technology have been developed. The IAEA has expressed interest in a joint project to increase the protection against additional attacks identified and to raise the TRL level and to make the tracker ready for commercialization.

The IAEA will participate in the preparation of the ITT.

The objective of the activity is to study, design, implement and demonstrate a resilient and robust GNSS tracker to support IAEA safeguards activities, and other similar activities requiring Assured PNT

The tasks to be performed shall include:

• Based on EL1-077, the activity will study, design, implement and demonstrate the technologies required for the GNSS tracker, capable of detecting and mitigating jamming, meaconing and spoofing attacks, with focus on concrete uses cases and attack scenarios identified by IAEA.
• Additional technologies (for example tightly coupled INS and CRPAs) will be integrated into a functional prototype. As part of the demonstration, the prototype will be subject to thorough tests representative of challenging jamming, meaconing and spoofing scenarios mounted by capable attackers.

The activity is part of a roadmap to make available to customers GNSS trackers with Assured PNT and will bring the technology to a TRL which will allow industry to make confident proposals for an Element 2. The activity will not include any Galileo PRS technology, as per NAVISP Declaration.

The main outputs of the activity will consist of:

• Design of jamming/meaconing/spoofing resistant GNSS tracker
• Prototype GNSS tracker, including test bed for evaluation in both nominal and attack scenarios, performance test report and user manual
• Expected RAMS, operations engineering, maintenance and recurrent unit costs
• Roadmap for commercialization, including potential Navisp EL2 activities

It is noted that no Participating State expressed their opt-out for this activity (EL1-130).