Fourth speaker announced for September cybersecurity webinar

James T. Curran, European Space Agency, will speak on general system perspectives of GNSS security during the September GPS World webinar, “GPS/GNSS and Cybersecurity.”

James T. Curran

The Microsemi sponsored webinar takes place Thursday, Sept. 22, at 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT / 7 p.m. CEST. Registration is free.

The webinar will cover two closely related topics:

1. The role of GPS products and services in maintaining the cybersecurity of national and global infrastructures.
2. The cyberthreats to GPS itself, and products and services to combat them.

The one-hour webinar also will include a follow-up Q&A session with the speakers.

Curran will discuss these questions:

• What do we mean by “secure GNSS”?
• How should we define anti-spoofing requirements for a system design?
• How should we assess it’s performance?
• How should we define (if at all) MOPS for secure receivers?
• Should we formalize receiver protocol?
• Where is the boundary between a secure GNSS-signal feature, and secured receiver?

“There is a very interesting distinction to be made between building receivers which provide robustness against malicious threats, and designing signals which themselves are secure,” Curran told GPS World “One drives the system-side, and the other drives the receiver community. Ultimately, of course, both matter to the user.”

Curran received his B.E. in electrical engineering in 2006 and his Ph.D. in telecommunications in 2010, from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Cork, Ireland. His main research interests are signal processing and information theory for weak-signal tracking algorithms and software defined radio for GNSS applications. He is currently working at the European Space Agency.