Holy shit, that really happened? Just finished watching “For All Mankind” and recognized some events, but had no idea this one was real.
Comment on Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do
thehatfox@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 10 months ago
_s10e@feddit.de 10 months ago
I can’t understand what is to be gained by deliberately trying to knock civilian airliners off course.
You don’t deal with terrorists, do you?
Forester@yiffit.net 10 months ago
GPS guided drone attacks
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 10 months ago
Would that be relevant for a drone attack? I wouldn’t think a drone that isn’t operated by a state actor is likely to be moving that fast, and presumably a state actor could build their own chips without a limiter?
billiam0202@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Thus the point of the spoofing. A drone will be moving much slower than 300 m/s, so spoofing GPS would be an attempt to force it off-course.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 10 months ago
Ah, I see, I misunderstood what you meant
shortwavesurfer@monero.town 10 months ago
Are you meaning 300 measurements per second? Because civilian gps has an accuracy of ~3 meters. I may be misunderstanding though
ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
The GPS chips have internal limits on how fast they think they can move. If they determine that they are moving faster than 300m/s they will stop outputting any results for a period of time. This limit is, IIRC, put in at the silicon level, so only military chips can bypass it.
If you try to use mapping apps on a plane you sometimes run into this issue.
sanmarzano@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It is trivial to make your GPS receiver firmware ignore these limits. There are even open-source receivers (SwiftNav piksi, for example). Modifying a binary is much harder, but not impossible for a motivated state like Iran or Russia. It’s best to think of the COCOM limits as suggestions.
EarMaster@lemmy.world 10 months ago
But even the fastest airliners at the moment (A330 neo) moves slower than 300m/s. Wikipedia claims that COCOM limits are even higher so I don’t think that they are the reason for the inaccurate tracking on planes.
shortwavesurfer@monero.town 10 months ago
Oh, neat. I was not aware of that. I have seen that before but thought it was due to the phone not being able to lock on to the signal from inside a big metal tube.