ESA Pulls Sensitive Presentations from Conference
October 26, 2010The European Space Agency (ESA) abruptly withdrew six — or possibly more — technical presentations on new Galileo developments from the European Navigation Conference (ENC) without immediate explanation. Probing by GPS World after the fact elicited a reply that “the papers were withdrawn by ESA because they contained too detailed information that could have led to knowledge transfer.” A further hypothetical, and emphatically unofficial possible reason was posited later by one knowledgeable attendee, having to do with security issues.
Most of the presentations were due to be given during a session on “Galileo Development and Test Results” on Tuesday afternoon, October 19, before an international audience in Braunschweig, Germany. The withdrawal created some consternation among the several hundred conference attendees, as the session would have been the technical highlight of the conference and was looked forward to with much anticipation, and further because no official explanation for the action was offered. An somewhat dated presentation was offered in place of the first paper, and the rest of the session was simply dismissed.
The German Institute of Navigation (DGON), which hosted the ENC, announced the cancellation of the papers at the beginning of the session, at 4 pm local time. Under heated questioning from the audience, the hosts revealed that they had been notified of the official withdrawal of the papers a few days previously. They did not explain why they waited until the opening of the session itself to advise conference attendees. The following can only be speculation, but the announcement may have been withheld to avoid embarrassment or controversy for the ESA directors who appeared onstage and spoke during the ENC’s opening and keynote presentations, earlier in the day.
Later on during the conference, GPS World heard speculation from a conference participant, who did not have any official knowledge or clearance, that one or more of the papers may have contained information about the Galileo ground control system that, if made public, might have created vulnerabilities to Internet hacking attacks on the system.
The papers that were withdrawn included:
- Galileo Orbit and Synchronisation Processing Facility (OSPF): First Performance and Robustness Results Obtained with the Operational Element
- First User Receiver-Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) Integrity and Interference Mitigation Tests Results with Upgraded German Galileo Test Range (GATE)
Later, however, the GATE manager stated to GPS World that this particular paper was not withdrawn by ESA for any official reason, but by the GATE organization itself, because it had received the special test receiver necessary from ESA too late to perform the tests in question, and thus to present the results.
- Galileo Ground Mission Segment Operability Chain
- Experimental Verification of GNSS Integrity and Statistical Solutions for Galileo Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) Overbounding
- Galileo Constellation System Verification Processes and Methods
And, from a later session on GNSS Software and Algorithms, also withdrawn was:
- First Results of the Coherent E5 ALTBOC Processing with the Galileo TUS Receiver
The authors of three of the cited papers are staffers from ESA itself; the authors of the other three come from companies that are under contract to the space agency.
Further details and discussion of this incident will appear in Alan Cameron’s October 28 webinar, “Highights of the European Navigation Conference” (register here) and in his GNSS Design and Test e-mail newsletter, which will be posted later this week on this page.
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