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.
Wow. The state of Israel is really piling on the reasons to hate it these days.
And Russia was doing it just a few years ago, too.
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.
I’ve got an idea, how bout stop using the same technology from 20 years ago?
Yet another reason to avoid the middle east
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.
Holy shit, that really happened? Just finished watching “For All Mankind” and recognized some events, but had no idea this one was real.
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?
Do none of the systems, GPS, glonass etc. use encryption or authentication of any form?
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.
The problem is with the way GPS works. Your device gets telemetry from the satellites. A fake signal can screw up the whole system.
But if they had authentication you would know that the message doesn’t come from a legitimate satélite.
If their isn’t then there’s a big problem with implementing that now, which would require a retrofit of every single GPS system currently in use and likely a replacement of all GPS satellites
Edit: I’m slightly mistaken, the military uses encryption but they don’t have that open for public use.
GPS is old, the amount of data you get from the satellite is small, essentially satellite id and timestamp. If we would redesign this today, you could include a digital signature.
Sure, but… you can google this to verify … one can probably manipulate GPS by introducing delay, i.e. resend data from a sat that was hear some seconds ago. With this signal the location will be off.
But that would also mean the timestamp to be off. Just resending them would also require extremely precise timing if you want to simulate a position that is not anywhere but just a bit off the last position. Making a GPS position jumping around half the world is (comparably) easy, pushing it off for a few kilometers is much, much harder.
I generally don’t believe in an isolationist American policy except for Israel. They always drag us into stupid shit like this.
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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.
Nobody knows what to do?
How they did between 1890 and 1980? Maybe with paper maps and their eyes? It needs investigating!
I don’t know from 1903 to 1980 but from 1890 to 1903 they did not fly at all. The first “modern” flight happened in December 1903.
Clément Ader ?
