In 2023, at least 20 civilian aircraft flying via the Center East have been misled by their onboard GPS models into flying close to Iranian airspace with out clearance—conditions that would have provoked a world incident. These planes have been victims of GPS spoofing, by which misleading indicators from the bottom, disguised as reliable indicators from GPS satellites in orbit, trick an plane’s devices into reporting the plane’s location as someplace that it isn’t. Spoofing is a extra refined tactic than GPS jamming, by which malicious indicators overwhelm a focused GPS receiver till it might probably now not perform.
Long theorized, GPS spoofing assaults have more and more cropped up in civilian airspace in recent times, prompting issues about this new frontier in digital warfare. IEEE Spectrumspoke with Todd Humphreys of the College of Texas at Austin about how spoofing works and the way plane might be shielded from it.
What’s an instance of a GPS spoofing assault?
Todd Humphreys: In 2017, we started to see spoofing assaults taking place within the Black Sea. As time progressed, the spoofing has solely gotten extra refined and extra widespread. These days, when you’re within the Japanese Mediterranean, and also you’re on a flight sure for Turkey or Cyprus or Israel, it’s very likely that the GPS models in your plane will get spoofed. They are going to point out a place on the Beirut airport or in Cairo. And it’s as a result of Israel is sending out indicators that idiot GPS receivers for a whole lot of kilometers across the nation.
How can spoofing be detected?
Humphreys: It’s provable that you just can’t, in all instances, detect spoofing. That’s as a result of GPS is a one-way system. It broadcasts indicators, but it surely doesn’t take any enter from the receivers. So there’s all the time the opportunity of any person broadcasting a lookalike sign and fooling a receiver.
How can airways scale back the possibilities of their planes’ GPS models being spoofed?
Humphreys: There’s an antenna on the entrance of enormous industrial plane, and within the aft additionally, there’s an antenna. Combining these collectively and analyzing the indicators from them would allow you to detect virtually all instances of spoofing.
So what’s the catch?
Humphreys: I spoke with Boeing about this a few years in the past. I stated, “Look, I’d wish to give you a approach of mixing the indicators from these two completely different antennas in order that you can extra readily detect spoofing.” And so they identified that it was crucial for his or her techniques that these antennas function completely independently as a result of they’re there for redundancy. They’re there for security causes.
Will the battle in opposition to spoofing all the time be an arms race?
Humphreys: There’s typically a trade-off between conventional security on the one hand—and then again, purposeful assaults from strategic adversaries. So it actually is determined by what you’re making an attempt to guard your self from. Is it that possibly one in all your inside GPS antennas is simply going to spontaneously fail, which does occur? Or is it that your most urgent worry is being caught within the crossfire of a struggle zone and having your GPS receiver spoofed with out understanding? Sadly, it’s robust to handle each of those issues with the identical {hardware} on the similar time.
This text seems within the January 2025 concern as “5 Questions for Todd Humphreys.”
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