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 and Iran are the source of the spoofing.
Edited*
And Iran, according to the article
Israel Iran and Russia be like
Lemmy is starting to feel like Discord with people dropping lazy images like this in every damn thread.
Literally couldn’t even bother to edit the image so the country names are in the image.
Yeah on my phone in hospital waiting room, didn’t have time.
has enough literacy skills to pick up on humor in more than just the shared image
I thought it was funny, anyway…
And Russia was doing it just a few years ago, too.
The article says the spoofing was first recorded in September from Iran, then Israel started doing some after the October Hammas attacks
Wow. The state of Israel is really piling on the reasons to hate it these days.
It was doing this for decades but Western countries only start hearing about it.
Social media have prevailed over classic media, and this time they have proven to be harder to steer.
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.
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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I’ve got an idea, how bout stop using the same technology from 20 years ago?
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.
This sounds rather dangerous. GPS was originally opened up to civilian use for the purpose of keeping flights on course, after the disaster of Korean Air Flight 007 straying into Soviet airspace and being shot down back in the 1980s.
I can’t understand what is to be gained by deliberately trying to knock civilian airliners off course.
Do none of the systems, GPS, glonass etc. use encryption or authentication of any form?
The problem is with the way GPS works. Your device gets telemetry from the satellites. A fake signal can screw up the whole system.
Yes Galileo supports encryption. But as far as I know it’s not in use. Has been trialled only. But I know all Airbus aircraft only support GPS satellites and nothing else (yet). I assume Boeing, being American would be the same then.
As far as solutions go, an aircraft can navigate fine without GPS. It can update its position from ground navigation aids and if they are not available it can still Dead Reckon very well. The navigation error very slowly grows until it’s out of the black spot and can use GPS or navigation aid to increase its accuracy. But this navigation error on the time frame of say an hour is a matter of kilometers at most, not dozens.
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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.
Nobody knows what to do?
How they did between 1890 and 1980? Maybe with paper maps and their eyes? It needs investigating!
