In 2023, a minimum of 20 civilian plane flying by way of the Center East had been misled by their onboard GPS items into flying close to Iranian airspace with out clearance—conditions that would have provoked a global incident. These planes had been victims of GPS spoofing, through 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 subtle tactic than GPS jamming, through which malicious indicators overwhelm a focused GPS receiver till it could actually now not perform.
Lengthy theorized, GPS spoofing assaults have more and more cropped up in civilian airspace lately, 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 could be protected against 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 subtle and extra widespread. These days, in case you’re within the Japanese Mediterranean, and also you’re on a flight certain for Turkey or Cyprus or Israel, it’s very possible that the GPS items in your plane will get spoofed. They may 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 bunch of kilometers across the nation.
How can spoofing be detected?
Humphreys: It’s provable that you simply can not, 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 at all times the potential of someone broadcasting a lookalike sign and fooling a receiver.
How can airways cut back the probabilities of their planes’ GPS items being spoofed?
Humphreys: There’s an antenna on the entrance of huge business plane, and within the aft additionally, there’s an antenna. Combining these collectively and analyzing the indicators from them would allow you to detect nearly all instances of spoofing.
So what’s the catch?
Humphreys: I spoke with Boeing about this a few years in the past. I mentioned, “Look, I’d prefer to give you a approach of mixing the indicators from these two totally different antennas in order that you could possibly extra readily detect spoofing.” And so they identified that it was essential for his or her methods that these antennas function fully independently as a result of they’re there for redundancy. They’re there for security causes.
Will the battle towards spoofing at all times be an arms race?
Humphreys: There may be usually a trade-off between conventional security on the one hand—and however, purposeful assaults from strategic adversaries. So it actually will depend on what you’re making an attempt to guard your self from. Is it that possibly one among your inside GPS antennas is simply going to spontaneously fail, which does occur? Or is it that your most urgent concern is being caught within the crossfire of a conflict zone and having your GPS receiver spoofed with out understanding? Sadly, it’s robust to deal with each of those issues with the identical {hardware} on the identical time.
This text seems within the January 2025 difficulty as “5 Questions for Todd Humphreys.”
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