Comment on Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 10 months agoIran 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”.
Update the spoofed location based on the aircraft’s actual position 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 a location west of London. The aircraft thinks it is west of London, and turns to the east to get to spoofed-London.
Treczoks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Actually, the issue is far more complicated than that.
argarath@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Could you expand on what’s the issue? I’m honestly curious
Treczoks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
argarath@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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!!