Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New “spoofing” attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is “highly significant” for airline safety.
TL:DR: Israel is the source of the spoofing.
And Russia was doing it just a few years ago, too.
Iran has been doing this shit for decades. I’m sure Israel has too.
Basically, they figure out what a GPS receiver would hear if it was receiving signals from a specific location, say “London”. They then broadcast those exact signals. Any receiver that hears them now thinks it is in “London”.
Start with the aircraft’s actual position, and update the spoofed location based where it actually is and and its intended destination, and you can get it to go where you want it.
If the aircraft is trying to fly to London, for example, and you want it to turn to the east of its track, you start spoofing that it has drifted west on its track to London. The aircraft thinks it is west of London, and turns to the east to get to spoofed-London.
Actually, the issue is far more complicated than that.
Could you expand on what’s the issue? I’m honestly curious
GPS relies on timing - very precise timing - and signed signals. It might be that GPS units ignore that the signal should be signed, but the (picosecond) timing basically defines an objects’ position in space. A picosecond makes a difference of a few centimeters.
Now, modern planes don’t primarily rely on GPS. They have gyroscopes. But as gyroscopes lose precision over the duration of the flight, they cross-reference with GPS to fix this loss of precision. But for that, the measured GPS location must be close enough to the gyroscope-based location, or the GPS result is discarded as erroneous. So one needs not only to spoof any GPS signal, it must be close enough to the actual position, and then slowly move the target over.
BTW, the villains in the movie “Tomorrow never dies” use a different approach. They influence the GPS satellites directly, which is a totally different thing, and if Iran did attempt that, I think the US would react differently and … more directly.
Wow this is so cool!! I did know it was timing based and needed to be precise, but this is so crazy! And to think we’ve gotten so good at making these precise timing circuits to just add them to all phones like it’s nothing! This is really cool! And the part about spoofing GPS in planes, that is even crazier how can anyone accomplish that is beyond me it’s pretty much magic at this point that’s so cool!!
In the cell phone there are specialized chips that “just” read the signal. They use some interesting tricks to catch the timing right, but can’t be used to produce such a signal. The satellite “just” sends a signal with it’s own position and the timecode (based on it’s own atomic clock). And those nanoseconds and picoseconds of difference when the signals from different satellites arrive determine the distance to those satellites, and together with their position, one can calculate the receivers location.
The article says the spoofing was first recorded in September from Iran, then Israel started doing some after the October Hammas attacks
The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission
Tomorrow Never Dies continues to be bizarrely relevant.
Is that the one with Jonathan Pryce as the villain? That was a good one
Johnathan Pryce as the mad, egocentric head of a mass media and tech empire with an inordinate amount of reach and influence on the world stage, who is chiefly concerned with becoming the sole source of media in a post-CCP China.
Which sounds funny and ridiculous in a 1997 spy movie, but in the last 20 years, we’ve seen just how much power mass media companies wield, how they can manipulate sizable percentages of a population, and how being the exclusive source of news for an entire country (China, no less) would give a media mogul incredible power and influence.
I’m not nervous, you’re nervous
That was a badass videogame on PS1. Core memory unlocked
Fucking serves them right, the aviation industry have been buying GPS devices for decades that bleed outside and don’t explicitly filter down to their spectrum. There was a satellite internet startup in the US that went through the whole process, bought its spectrum and was ready to launch, then the aviation industry complained and had them shut down because their devices were all shit and “it would be too difficult to change everyone’s equipment”.
Do you have something I can read about this? It’s a little vague, so hard for me to search, and it sounds like something I would be interested in. Thanks
Pretty sure this is the story, rings true to my memory of the company name starting with “L”: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/lightsquared-broadband-a-threat-to-gps/
Although this article doesn’t cover how the GPS systems used cheap filtering circuits that didn’t adequately filter out adjacent frequencies. This was done purely to save money, because there wasn’t anything using the adjacent frequencies. As a result, LightSquared went bankrupt in 2012.
Thanks I’ll give it a read.
Edited my last comment, I don’t think that article goes into much detail. It only really covers the objections by GPS device manufacturers against LightSquared, not the technical aspect ie poor filtering by cheap GPS devices.
This article covers LightSquared’s claims of poor filtering by GPS devices: https://www.networkworld.com/article/696602/wireless-lightsquared-says-gps-makers-ignored-filtering-rules.html
This article also covers some of it: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/lightsquared-blew-it-and-heres-why/
TL;DR GPS devices cut corners, however because they were established and so endemic across the industry, there was no practical way to fix them all and LightSquared was sent down the toilet.
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That just means you can’t use autoland in low visibility conditions. Modern IRUs (inertial reference unit) are highly accurate laser gyros that can use GPS for correction, but will throw out the data if it doesn’t make sense. Navigation won’t be affected much, and autoland (if used) will still rely on VHF guidance.
Ignore my ignorance. Are you saying the aircrafts track where they are going by calculating their position from gyroscope data? And this is more precise than GPS?
That’s like using the accelaration sensors in your phone to navigate. Or sailing with compass and nautical maps.
Possible. Tech isn’t even that novel. But still impressive.
Yes. Most of commercial navigation systems rely on the IRUs as a primary source of position data, and they’ll usually have 3 of them. VHF is used by the crew to confirm that the aircraft is on track by referencing VOR stations, though these are slowly being phased out due to GPS.
That being said, a single traditional IRU can have up to 2km of drift over a 2 hr flight (at which point it’s removed from service and replaced). When used in combination with two other IRUs, the error is dramatically reduced. Traditional IRUs are gyroscopically mechanical in nature and do not talk to GPS.
Now, that being said, the new standard is called an ADIRU (ADvanced IRU), which ties in with GPS and features laser gyros. They’re extremely accurate and have essentially zero drift, plus multiple redundant components within each unit.
If anyone is really curious about how INS works https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system
Also this Air Force training audio REALLY clears the subject up: https://youtu.be/VUrMuc-ULmM
The Missile Knows Where It Is
Transcription for the audio is as follows:
"The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t. By subtracting where it is from where it isn’t, or where it isn’t from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn’t, and arriving at a position where it wasn’t, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn’t, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn’t.
In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn’t, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn’t. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.
The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn’t, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn’t, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn’t be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error."
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/VUrMuc-ULmM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The missile knows where it is by knowing where it is not.
But the article mentioned that “the spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System”. How?
If it’s a smaller plane (such as a CRJ / ERJ) with only one IRU, it will not be able to determine if GPS is valid or not, so the drift correction gets spoiled.
Large commercial aircraft are using 3 IRUs, with newer aircraft using ADIRUs. If GPS does not agree with the three IRUs, the GPS data is thrown out. If the GPS is within tolerance, correction is applied. You could build up very small errors over a long distance, but you should still be pretty close to the airfield when you get there.
Well the article says it caused at least one plane to almost fly into Iran’s restricted airspace…
Yet another reason to avoid the middle east
What about GLONASS, Galilleo, or BDS? Are they all being equally jammed? Why wouldn’t they sync with all of them and use a consensus to determine accuracy? Like having multiple ntp servers.
The latest generations of gnss receivers have spoofing and jamming mitigation and detection features included with the chip, and multi-band rx technology to sync to more constellations simultaneously and do exactly what you’re talking about. Before then, the spoofing/jamming detection would likely need a software implementation after the receiver. There are different types of spoofing/jamming, all of which are detected and mitigated in different ways.
I don’t know the commercial aircraft industry standards for updating technology, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most commercial aircraft don’t have what you’re talking about.
We need a backup for GPS. LORAN should never have been shut down.
There are 3 of them. Galileo, Glonass and Beidou
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I generally don’t believe in an isolationist American policy except for Israel. They always drag us into stupid shit like this.
Easy solution: homing rockets that seek out the strongest signal using that band. Whitelist the sources that are official and proper.
GPS is passive so the rockets won’t go for the plane… it’ll go for the transmission tower.
Use less destructive devices if you’d rather risk sending humans to do the job.
It’s called a HARM, Homing Anti Radiation Missile.
boosting the stereotype
Nobody knows what to do?
How they did between 1890 and 1980? Maybe with paper maps and their eyes? It needs investigating!
They winged it
I don’t know from 1903 to 1980 but from 1890 to 1903 they did not fly at all. The first “modern” flight happened in December 1903.
