No signal left behind: New ways to detect jamming and spoofing

News from the European Space Agency

The European Space Agency (ESA) is working hard to ensure satellite navigation systems are resilient and is supporting companies and Member States in finding new ways to detect interference.

With 10% of European GDP enabled by satellite navigation, the economic impact of GNSS interference is significant. In the second quarter of 2025, more than 10 000 ships were reported as being impacted by malicious interference globally, marking an eightfold increase as compared to the first quarter of 2025.

Interference not only disrupts navigation on land, air and sea, but it also poses safety issues and economic losses as many ship systems, including fire safety and emergency beacons, as well as critical infrastructure such as power grids, are linked to GNSS. In 2025, a joint statement issued by several United Nations agencies called for the protection of signals from harmful interference.

GNSS interference can take many forms. In jamming, GNSS signals are drowned out by stronger signals. In spoofing, they are faked to mislead the receiver. GNSS interference also occurs naturally due to space weather. Charged particles in the ionosphere, influenced by the Sun, can disrupt or delay signals.

Finding ways to increase the resilience of satellite navigation systems is a top priority for ESA. As system development prime for the European Union, ESA is responsible for making existing systems such as Galileo and EGNOS more resilient.

Focused on innovation, ESA is building resilience by exploring a multi-layer system-of-systems for GNSS (for example through Celeste LEO-PNT), developing new technologies through research and development, and testing them at events like Jammertest.

The Navigation Innovation and Support Programme (NAVISP) facilitates innovation in positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), supports industrial competitiveness and assists Member States in their national strategy. Recently, NAVISP has supported three activities that develop new ways to monitor and map GNSS interference.

The Advanced Radio Frequency Interference Detection, Alerting and Analysis System (ARFIDAAS), developed by the Norwegian research centre SINTEF under NAVISP, continuously monitors Galileo, GPS and GLONASS frequencies to provide near real-time detection and analysis of interference.

ARFIDAAS stations in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Trondheim, Norway played a key role in research that traced powerful GNSS interference events affecting Europe, Greenland and Canada to a Russian military satellite system.

By enabling rapid alerts and building a database of known threats, ARFIDAAS supports operators of critical infrastructure in assessing disruptions and taking corrective action, while contributing to the long-term resilience and protection of GNSS-based services.

Dimetor GmbH, an Austrian company that specialises in monitoring services for telecommunications infrastructure, is using data from GNSS receivers mounted on mobile telecommunications towers to detect jamming and spoofing. This technique could provide jamming and spoofing maps at a country level.

This new method could provide jamming and spoofing data continuously over large areas, whereas current data are reported by pilots, so it is only available when aircraft are present.

By using GNSS receivers already present in telecommunications networks, the future service from this activity could enable faster, more accurate identification of where interference is happening, supporting authorities and service providers in protecting reliable positioning services.

Another project led by onocoy, a Swiss startup that is building a global, decentralised network of reference stations to provide corrections to GNSS data, is combining artificial intelligence with a community-driven monitoring approach to detect jamming and spoofing. This activity focuses on protecting high accuracy location services that are used in transport, logistics and autonomous systems.

In the first phase of the project, onocoy simulated, collected, analysed and experimented with spoofed GNSS data to train artificial intelligence to differentiate between spoofed and real signals.

Potential future phases will develop, train and validate AI-powered fraud detection algorithms and implement them in the onocoy network. This will increase the resilience of the network, allowing it to provide highly accurate GNSS data for critical applications.

By detecting interference and creating maps of jamming and spoofing at a country or even global scale, these solutions could help increase the reliability of satellite navigation for critical services and ensure accurate and continuous PNT services where they are needed most.