About the Project

Critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications networks, requires GNSS based time reference to enable their proper functioning
over a large area.
CHRISS ensures a significantly advanced time synchronisation by offering the first on the market, integrated into one device, Galileo-based timing distribution and synchronisation solution, making the critical infrastructure more resilient, available, accurate, reliable, and secure.
Especially emerging telecommunications applications such as 5G or Time Division Duplex require a highly accurate and secure timing
distribution. Failure of the time distribution service can lead to failure of critical infrastructure, resulting in blackouts or failure of the
telecommunications network with damages exceeding the billion € for whole economies as well as severe safety and security risks for
the general public.
From the very nature of the GNSS systems, they are vulnerable to external, independent, and arbitrary radio interferences, jamming
and spoofing. Consequently, the time synchronization may be interrupted or falsified, causing the real danger of time reference
outage or alteration of the telecom network time reference. Therefore, finding approaches for detecting and mitigating radio
interferences, jamming, and spoofing attacks is a critical issue for the security of telecom networks.
The CHRISS Time Synchronization Unit (TSU) platform will integrate the following main functionalities:
- Multi-frequency and multi-constellation GNSS/INS receiver supporting by design three (E1, E5, E6) Galileo frequency bands,
- A robust interference detection and mitigation algorithms,
- Spoofing detection and user notification methods,
- Galileo OSNMA ensuring authenticity of GNSS information,
- Block-chain based build-in security mechanism providing additional protection against cyber-attacks on synchronization messages transmitted via fiber optics,
- High precision time distribution protocol for nanosecond accuracy synchronization,
- FPGA – deterministic signal processing platform enabling implementation of all the above mentioned functionalities on one chip that provides control of time and distributed signals with precision down to single clock cycles, and at the same time eliminating delays or cyber-attack threads typical for data exchange between different devices.