LEO-Range: Physical Layer Design for Secure Ranging with Low Earth Orbiting Satellites

We propose LEO-Range, a novel physical layer design for secure ranging between Low Earth Orbiting ( LEO) satellites and devices. LEO-Range 1) is compatible with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM ) modulation scheme which is widely used by high-bandwidth satellite communications, 2) it provides accurate distance measurements (within the limits imposed by the available bandwidth) , and 3) it is provably secure and reliable across a range of common satellite channels. The design is based on a novel verification scheme in the frequency domain. We provide a security proof that bounds the probability of a distance-reduction attack for arbitrary physical layer attack strategies. We implement a prototype of LEO-Range and we test it with a hardware satellite channel emulator. In common line of sight 3GPP channels with SNRs between 8.8dB and 12dB (worst case scenario at low elevation) in a single ranging from a single satellite the adversary has a probability of less than 2−20 to successfully reduce the LEO-Range measured distance by more than 117 meters. These results already significantly limit spoofing, which typically can be done even across continents, and if distances are measured consecutively and from different satellites or ground stations, the overall distance and location spoofing will be even further limited, pointing to the practical viability of LEO-Range.