Secure Tracking Services

GSTP: Make Project: Secure Tracking Services (S-TrackS)

Company	Country	Website
CGI Nederland B.V. (Prime Contractor)	Netherlands	http://www.cginederland.nl/
Sintecs B.V.	Netherlands	http://www.sintecs.nl
Maanmittauslaitos (National Land Survey of Finland, Finnish Geospatial Research Institute) FGI	Finland	http://www.fgi.fi/

Traditional GNSS equipment that provides tracking capabilities can be subject to attacks such as spoofing and can therefore not be accepted as reliable evidence. S-TrackS will provide a service to derive an authenticated P&T solution based on recorded spectrum snapshots.

Objective

The main objective of this project is to develop prototypes of two elements, i.e. the recorder and the central server, that together form the basis of S-TrackS. 

Features

Recorder:

Initial trade-offs for the recorder specification are based on prototyping experiments using COTS Software Defined Radio Front Ends. For the S-TrackS project a new dedicated GNSS front end board will be developed. As part of this project it is planned to bring the development of an operational S-TrackS recorder to a dedicated field prototype. 

Central Server:

The main building blocks for the S-TrackS server have already been proven to work in an experimental laboratory setup with manual operations. In this project it is planned to further integrate the experimental laboratory setup to a further automated S-TrackS server that can support initial operations.

At this stage of the project all server elements will remain software based. The need for using hardware based components to support more demanding processing capacity and ease the accreditation process will be evaluated during this project.

Project Plan

Within this project prototypes of two elements, i.e. the recorder and the central server will be developed, that together form the basis of S-TrackS. The development of the two elements can be fully separated as the only interfacing between the two is already defined by the format of the RF sample file and its metadata. Next to these two development activities, a dedicated activity will address the evaluation of achievable performances. 

To ensure an efficient project flow, the following milestones have been defined:

• Kick-off Meeting (KOM): formal start of the project.
• Preliminary Design Review (PDR): to confirm the specification baseline and evaluate preliminary architectural design.
• Critical Design Review (CDR): evaluate architectural design.
• Component Factory Qualification Review (C-FQR): to accept the components prior to integration. 
• Final Review (FR): to present the final results and conclusions of all activities and to terminate the project.

Key Issues

Recorder: 

• Optimization in performance (Noise Figure and band selection)
• Power usage
• Snapshot size (bandwidth, sampling rate, bit depth and duration)
• Accurate timestamp and initial position estimate attached to snapshot as meta data

Central Server:

• Optimization in performance 
• Acquisition speed
• Acquisition success rate
• Tracking accuracy
• P&T accuracy
• Automatic processing flow of snapshots

Expected Main Benefits

The business case for S-TrackS, Secure Tracking Service, concept relies in the fact that there is either a commercial benefit or a governmental regulation for the ability to provide 100% reliable evidence about the past whereabouts of an asset. In other words candidate users that are looking for position information that can be authenticated and not be changed in the middle.

S-TrackS is a solution for applications where the owner, transporter or operator of an asset:

• Has commercial interests to be able to provide reliable proof of its past trajectory/route if this can avoid time consuming inspections (e.g. customs); 
• Requires reliable proof of its position to activate licenses or to protect against liability (insurance);
• Has an advantage when his positions will be accepted by the authorities as being legally correct (fishery---faster to fish market), so the fisherman can prove that he has been in the dedicated area where he was allowed to fish;  
• Is interested to be able to detect spoofing attacks.

Traditional GNSS equipment that provides tracking capabilities can be subject to attacks such as spoofing and can therefore not be accepted as reliable evidence.

Current status

For the S-TrackS project a new dedicated GNSS front end board will be developed around a COTS GNSS front end chip. This GNSS RFIC will be coupled with an IoT board that combined with this will become a cigarette box size recorder that can easily be integrated with current field equipment used in tracking applications.

For the central server, the Matlab based Reader will initially be used to further develop and elaborate the GNSS processing algorithms and to evaluate the achievable acquisition and tracking performances. In parallel the Matlab code will be implemented in C to gain processing speed and efficiency.

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