How to build navigational resilience for your military in a hackable world

QinetiQ, a UK-based defence and technology company, recently announced plans to expand its current facility for testing the position, navigation and timing (PNT) resilience of British defence assets. The company will build a new £20 million (US$26 million) facility at the Boscombe Down military base, which will be large enough and sophisticated enough to test the resilience of some of the UK’s largest defence assets, including Protector drones, Chinook helicopters and even the F-35 fighter jet.

But how crucial is PNT resilience in the 21^st century? Why is it worth spending so much money to test a single point of vulnerability in defence systems? And how likely are modern defence systems to encounter that vulnerability in the first place?

Shephard spoke to Andy Proctor, vice-president of the UK’s Royal Institute of Navigation, the oldest and largest such institute in Europe, to answer those questions.

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“First of all, the new facility that QinetiQ is planning is necessary not because the existing testing hangar isn’t good, but because PNT is an ever-evolving source of vulnerability,” Proctor explained. “So the new facility will put in place testing capabilities that the existing test centre had no need to think about when it was built. 

“If you can test the whole of a defence resource, then it’s a good idea to test it all,” he continued. “Now we can do full-on system-level testing against all sorts of adversarial conditions in the electronic warfare space, and do it in a very cost-effective and covert way”.

The nature of GNSS issues

Modern warfare is conducted in almost every imaginable environment on Earth. Some of those environments are extremely inimical to the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals that tell sophisticated electronic defence resources, from UAS to tanks to warships, where to go and why.

That poses a natural difficulty. Increasingly, however, the designers of defence assets are looking at ways to overcome those environmental challenges, and broader and more dense constellations of satellites are providing additional signal sources to obviate such potential PNT blind spots.

What kind of threats to PNT precision are adversaries still able to deploy?

“There are really clear and present threats,” said Proctor. “We know there are threats from jamming, and there are threats from spoofing – or signal denial and signal deception, as they’re more precisely described. And these days, there’s a significant cyber-element to the threat landscape, too. 

“These threats are multi-domain,” he notes. “The same kind of threats exist across the aviation domain, the maritime domain and the land domain. And both military and civilian assets are regularly threatened by adversaries with these technological abilities.”

Signal denial is straightforward, in that it can stop your defence assets going where you want them to go. Signal deception is more inherently devious, because if done effectively it can take your defence assets to where your adversary wants them to go, to make them easy targets for either destruction or theft.

Where does the cyber-threat enter the landscape?

“In elements like the spoofing of a warship’s AIS (Automatic Identification System),” Proctor remarked. “If you know where to go on the internet, you can find the tools to hack into an AIS data stream and replace position information. AIS spoofing is a cyber-threat where you hack into data streams and replace position information. That’s a very current threat.”

The increasing overlap of interconnected technology and systems and the ubiquity of the internet has acted as a democratising force for the kind of actor who has the skills to become a techno-general. As in the civilian world of the mega-hacker gangs like those behind the Lockbit ransomware, so the increasing use of GNSS as a principal source of position, navigation and timing information has opened up the militaries of the world to be hit harder and more often by those who can jam, hack or spoof those signal sources.

Eggs in a PNT basket

“The dependency on GNSS has increased massively over the last six or seven years,” Proctor stated. “It's gone exponential. GNSS drives things now that you wouldn’t expect it to just a few years ago. It's in everything. Our interest at the RIN is to accept the rapidly evolving reality of that, and push the case for increased resilience and robustness.” 

“What does best practice look like in PNT when the threat landscape continues to evolve at speed?” he asked. “We intend to find out.”

The RIN believes that best practice at the moment depends on not putting all your defence-critical PNT signals in a single basket.

“There are so many sources of data now,” noted Proctor. “GNSS, which is MEO-based (Medium Earth Orbit), to LEO -based (Low Earth Orbit). There’s geospace-based PNT and vision-based navigation. And then there's the nascent ELORAN (Enhanced LORAN), which hopefully will be expanded upon as a fundamentally different but equal positioning system. But you’ve also got terrestrial RF (Radio Frequency) systems, localised RF systems, hyperlocal positioning systems, ultra-wide band and radar-based systems. It’s a very rich potential PNT environment.”

And the more of it any military uses, the harder it becomes to effect signal denial or signal deception. “But the question now is how do you bring as much of it as possible together in ways that are necessary, light, and cost-effective,” Proctor proposed.

Building the PNT solution your military needs

How do you build the PNT combinations that any element of your military is most likely to need for any given operation?

“The supply of PNT is increasing as the dependency on principal systems like GNSS is becoming more recognised. It’s taken longer to get that recognition than we at the RIN would have liked”, Proctor admitted. “But now in the UK, we have a national PNT office which sits within the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. We have access to the skills and knowledge. There’s a UK community of interest in PNT, sharing information across government. So there’s some governance in place to provide the oversight that is required when it comes to the defence requirements for PNT resilience and robustness”, he added.

Proctor extended that positivity to the defence community. “The MoD is making similar progress as a department. It has a PNT office now in Strategic Command, and that is focused on making sure that frontline personnel have the capabilities, the services and the products they need to defeat, overcome and mitigate the issues they'll face.”

Those capabilities extend from anti-jamming antennas to an assured capability in terms of inertial navigation, and a coherent sense of how elements of PNT resilience are fused together. Proctor added that there were programmes already looking ahead to the advent of quantum systems, quantum navigators, quantum clocks and quantum computing.

But as with any military making strategic decisions, Proctor acknowledged that there was an obvious problem. 

“It all takes money, and there's not that much to go around,” he added. “Money, time and genius. Time you’re always fighting. Genius, we have. But financial prioritisation when it comes to what we invest in will be as crucial in the next few years as either of the other two elements.”

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