Securing India’s Skies: Countering The Threat Of GPS Spoofing And Hybrid Warfare – Analysis

By Soumya Awasthi

In March 2025, the Indian government formally confirmed in the Lok Sabha an alarming trend of GPS interference and spoofing reported in the Amritsar and Jammu air corridors. The Ministry of State for Civil Aviation in the Lok Sabha revealed over 465 incidents between 2023 and 2025. This unprecedented rise, affecting both commercial and surveillance aircraft, has raised significant concerns over national airspace integrity and aviation safety.

These incidents mirror tactics seen earlier in West Asia and Eastern Europe, but now directly impact India’s western and eastern borders. This revelation confirms the technical vulnerability of aircraft as a part of the grey-zone tactics by India’s adversaries, particularly Pakistan and China, who are leveraging spoofing as a non-conventional, deniable tool to disrupt India’s aerospace domain.

GPS spoofing is not only a technical anomaly but could be a powerful tool of asymmetric or electronic warfare, capable of misleading aircraft, disrupting airspace surveillance, and endangering civilian lives, capable of undermining national security without confrontation.

At the 14^th ICAO Air Navigation Conference in 2024, global aviation authorities unanimously identified GNSS interference as a harmful “significant cyber risk” strategic cyber threat, emphasising its implications for nations facing border or grey-zone conflicts.

Understanding GPS Spoofing and Its Global Implications

GPS spoofing involves transmitting phoney signals to mislead navigation systems into miscalculating their position, time, or velocity. Unlike jamming, which blocks signals altogether, spoofing subtly deceives systems without being detected instantly, posing operational risks. Aircraft are particularly vulnerablebecause GNSS signals, transmitted from satellites over 20,000 kilometres above Earth, are inherently weak. Spoofed signals, being stronger, can be readily adopted by an aircraft’s Flight Management System (FMS), Automatic Dependent Surveillance systems (ADS-B/ADS-C), and Ground Proximity Warning Systems used by the pilots. This misdirection could lead to aircraft veering off course, encountering unexpected terrain obstacles, or misrepresenting their positions to air traffic control.

Globally, militaries and non-state actors have recognised spoofing’s potential. During the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russian forces employed systems like Krasukha-4 and Tirada-2 to spoof GNSS signals, confusing drones, missiles, and aircraft. Similarly, Iran reportedly used spoofing to hijack a U.S. RQ-170 drone in 2011. Similarly, during the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan extensively used electronic warfare and GNSS spoofing to disable Armenian radar and air defence systems, allowing Turkish and Israeli-made drones to dominate the skies. Spoofing is thus no longer a theoretical threat—it is a well-established tool in electronic and asymmetric warfare.

Spoofing Along India’s Borders

The surge in GPS spoofing incidents along India’s sensitive western and northeastern borders between late 2023 and early 2025 highlights a troubling convergence of electronic warfare and grey-zone strategies. The table below lists key statistics and patterns observed:

These GPS spoofing incidents did not occur in isolation. The near-simultaneous interception of drones by the Border Security Force (BSF)—nearly 300 Pakistani drones—infiltrating Indian airspace in the same regions suggests a coordinated electronic warfare strategy by the adversaries. Many of these drones carried narcotics, counterfeit currency, and arms, indicating an intent to fuel local instability while masking movements through electromagnetic interference.

The GPSjam portal and OPSGROUP aviation alerts provide corroborating evidence that, within the Delhi Flight Information Region, spoofing reports have become a daily phenomenon since early 2024, affecting over 10 percent of flights. And the India-Pakistan and India-Myanmar borders are consistently ranked among the top five global hotspots for GNSS navigation anomalies. Overall, these spoofing campaigns achieved tactical disruption, operational masking, and strategic signalling: creating immediate confusion in controlled airspace, shielding illicit cross-border activities. In short, it can influence a nation’s strategic and security capability of the nation.

Potential Use by Violent Non-State Actors

While state actors like Pakistan and China are probable sources, the risk of violent non-state actors leveraging spoofing technology cannot be discounted. Groups engaged in narcotics trade, arms smuggling, or insurgency could exploit spoofing to disrupt surveillance, navigate across hostile territories, or facilitate illicit operations without immediate detection.

Spoofing devices can now be constructed using commercially available components, including software-defined radios (SDRs) and GPS signal simulators. These systems can be miniaturised, battery-operated, and even drone-mounted, allowing terrorist groups to fly spoofers near sensitive installations, airports, or even national borders. Moreover, terrorist groups operating with the support of hostile states can act in collusion. Pakistan, often accused of harbouring and supporting terror outfits, presents a real danger in this context. The convergence of drug trafficking, weapons delivery, and spoofing attacks creates a hybrid threat environment that is tough to monitor and neutralise.

Furthermore, extremist outfits might adopt spoofing for more nefarious purposes: hijacking navigation-dependent drones for attacks, misguiding aircraft near sensitive installations, or disrupting critical logistics during military operations.

Tackling the Threat: Recommendations

Addressing the spoofing threat requires an all-inclusive approach, and therefore, India must adopt a proactive, multidimensional strategy that integrates technological innovation and strategic policies.

1. The development and deployment of the NAVIC satellite navigation system and the Indian Army’s experimentation with GPS-denied UAV operations are commendable steps toward securing autonomy and resilience. Collaboration between the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) under the Ministry of Civil Aviation in India and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and neighbouring countries to share spoofing incident data and best practices.
2. The Ministry of Civil Aviation in India could procure and deploy ground and airborne sensors to detect, locate, and attribute spoofing sources in near-real time, using triangulation-based methods for rapid spoofing detection. Optical gyroscopes on a chip offer reliable, satellite-independent inertial navigation—ideal for aircraft, UAVs, and autonomous systems operating in GPS-denied environments. Coupling this with a crowdsourced detection grid that transforms smartphones and civilian devices into real-time GNSS interference sensors can significantly enhance situational awareness.
3. Although the DGCA directed all aircraft in 2021 to be equipped with indigenous GNSS receivers and Satellite-Based Augmentation Systems (SBAS) like GAGAN, there have been delays due to numerous factors, like a lack of GAGAN-enabled receivers on the aircraft. DGCA must expedite the implementation of the guideline and ensure that ISRO and AAI address the compliance issues
4. Enhancing the military grade system, for example, the Indian Army has developed SAMBHAV (Secure Army Mobile Bharat Vision) as an end-to-end encrypted mobile ecosystem for secure communication, and while it’s not explicitly mentioned as an anti-spoofing tool, its security features can be relevant to preventing spoofing attempts.
5. Equip aircraft with GNSS anomaly detectors by integrating multi-sensor navigation systems, such as Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) and multi-constellation receivers, to cross-verify positional data.
6. Although the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), also known as NavIC, is fully operational and provides a regional navigation service for India, it is not yet as widely adopted as global systems like GPS, due to global infrastructure, and promoting and adopting as a complementary system rather than replacement to the worldwide system. The Ministry of Civil Aviation should encourage commercial airlines to implement the NavIC system.
7. The Government of India must invest in producing an indigenous low-cost general-purpose NavIC receiver for resilient GNSS technologies and anti-spoofing technologies that are not dependent on foreign hardware, particularly Chinese hardware. India further needs to develop capabilities in advanced quantum-resistant systems.

Conclusion

GPS spoofing represents a silent yet potent threat to India’s aviation safety, border security, and national sovereignty. With incidents escalating along volatile borders and given the relatively low cost and high impact of spoofing technology, India faces a complex challenge in defending its skies. While the problem is sophisticated, it is not insurmountable. Through a combination of technical innovation, operational vigilance, diplomatic coordination, and strategic deterrence, India can secure its airspace against this emerging electronic battlefield. With cohesive implementation, India can deter grey zone threats, secure its civil and military skies, and demonstrate technological resolve. What begins as an operational challenge can catalyse defence modernisation and regional leadership in navigation security.

• About the author: Soumya Awasthi is Fellow, Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at Observer Research Foundation.
• Source: This article was published by Observer Research Foundation.