Cyber Security

Product Information

Operational Technology (OT) across all sectors is increasingly complex and reliant on accurate timing and synchronisation to operate. This synchronisation can be either within a single site or across a wide network of equipment regionally or nationally. Most time and synchronisation systems rely on signals from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as GPS or GLONASS. GNSS outages either deliberately or accidently can have a significant impact on OT and protection and hardening of OT infrastructures should therefore be part of an organisation’s overall cyber security strategy.

GNSS signals are very low power by design. In orbit 20,000 km from earth, the satellites have to run on minimal power and the signals from the constellations are based on a timing pulse taken from atomic clocks on board the satellites and co-ordinated by an earth-based control infrastructure. These signals are directly traceable to UTC – the world’s reference timescale.  The power levels of the signals and open nature of the communication leaves them susceptible to disruption through spoofing and jamming.

GNSS jamming is somewhat easier to detect than spoofing as it results in the complete loss or absence of the original radio signal and is relatively easy to detect in the GNSS receiver itself. Spoofing however can be much more troublesome to identify. The intention of spoofing the GNSS signal is to create a copy or a clone of the signal that appears authentic to a GNSS receiver. Depending on the level of sophistication employed by the attacker some spoofed signals can be almost impossible to differentiate from the original. Having complete control over the spoofing of a signal an adversary could very subtlety alter timing or location information which could over time be enough to cause failures and malfunctions in those systems reliant on GNSS.

Chronos has a range of cyber security services which can help you ensure maximum resilience. You can benefit from our strong expertise in protecting your operational technology. From project inception to ongoing operation, we can help you implement early detection systems and design your GNSS networks so that your critical systems always have accurate timing data.

CHRONOSec™ Audit Services

Get the expert help you need to build effective cyber security strategies and mitigation plans, so that your operational technology can handle any GNSS disruption.

Access to the Latest Technology

You can gain access to all the very latest cyber security technology through Chronos. For example, the BlueSky™ GNSS Firewall from Microchip can detect signal anomalies, such as spoofing, jamming incidents, multipath signal interference and space weather conditions, among other issues.

The Chronos Difference

Contact us to discover how our team of experts can help you to ensure resilience and accuracy in your timing networks.