Innovative Strategy for Vehicle Position Certification on the basis of GNSS reference time

Thanks to precise synchronization of the satellite atomic clocks, reference time distribution over world-wide area can be provided by GNSS, such as GPS and incoming European Galileo. Single-frequency GPS receivers have been used for synchronizing telecommunications equipment since the early 90psilas, currently providing an accuracy of about tens of nanoseconds down to some nanoseconds in static scenarios and relying on timing-oriented as well as geodetic-quality receivers. In addition to time and frequency transfer purposes, such an effective global reference time can support a great number of emerging Location Based Services (LBS). Particularly, the paper shows an innovative GNSS time-based application in road transportation remote monitoring as a method to enhance the safety of vehicles carrying precious and dangerous goods. Particularly, the paper shows an innovative strategy employed to certify and so to enhance the safety of vehicles carrying precious and dangerous goods. In fact, the trust on the position autonomously evaluated by a GNSS receiver can be harmed by a lot of attacks performed on the tracking chain (i.e., signals in space, receiver, communication channel), and so the location certification method becomes a key point to assure the security of tracking and tracing applications. This method makes use of tamper resistance techniques at receiver-level to defend the receiver from external source attack, a time-evolving employing symmetric key encryption to protect the communication channel and a synchronization techniques based on the GNSS time to increase the reliability of the tracking chain.