Electromagnetic remote sensing technologies such as radar can be misled by targets that generate spoof pulses. Typically, a would-be spoofer must make measurements to characterize a received pulse in order to design a convincing spoof pulse. The precision of such measurements is ultimately limited by quantum noise. Here we introduce a model of electromagnetic spoofing that includes effects of practical importance that were neglected in prior theoretical studies. In particular, the model includes thermal background noise and digital quantization noise, as well as loss in transmission, propagation, and reception. We derive the optimal probability of detecting a spoofer allowed by quantum physics. We show that heterodyne reception and thresholding closely approaches this optimal performance. Finally, we show that a high degree of certainty in spoof detection can be reached by Bayesian inference from a sequence of received pulses. Together these results suggest that a practically realizable receiver could plausibly detect a radar spoofer by observing errors in the spoof pulses due to quantum noise.

• Received 5 August 2023
• Accepted 14 December 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.013179

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society