Critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications networks, requires GNSS based time reference to enable their proper functioning over a large area.
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.

Moreover, critical infrastructure requires safety layers, ensuring protection and integrity in the communication between nodes and terminals in the network (e.g. time synchronisation at the base stations of the telecommunications networks). The emerging technology of blockchain-based verification, identification and coding has been proven multiple times to be the future of information exchange applications.

In the presented initiative, the ""Critical infrastructure High accuracy and Robustness increase Integrated Synchronization Solutions – CHRISS will demonstrate first on the market, an integrated into one device, Galileo based timing distribution and synchronization solution enabling increased resilience to GNSS signals interference, jamming, spoofing and cyber-attack on fiber-optics distribution layer resulting in increased time distribution service availability, accuracy and reliability.