In 2023, not less than 20 civilian plane flying via the Center East have 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 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 could now not operate.
Lengthy theorized, GPS spoofing assaults have more and more cropped up in civilian airspace in recent times, prompting considerations 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 may be protected against it.
What’s an instance of a GPS spoofing assault?
Todd Humphreys: In 2017, we started to see spoofing assaults occurring within the Black Sea. As time progressed, the spoofing has solely gotten extra refined and extra widespread. These days, in the event you’re within the Japanese Mediterranean, and also you’re on a flight sure for Turkey or Cyprus or Israel, it’s very possible that the GPS items 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 bunch of kilometers across the nation.
How can spoofing be detected?
Humphreys: It’s provable that you simply can not, in all circumstances, detect spoofing. That’s as a result of GPS is a one-way system. It broadcasts indicators, nevertheless it doesn’t take any enter from the receivers. So there’s at all times the potential for someone broadcasting a lookalike sign and fooling a receiver.
How can airways scale back the probabilities of their planes’ GPS items being spoofed?
Humphreys: There’s an antenna on the entrance of huge 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 circumstances 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 prefer to give you a approach of mixing the indicators from these two totally different antennas in order that you might extra readily detect spoofing.” They usually identified that it was crucial for his or her programs that these antennas function fully independently as a result of they’re there for redundancy. They’re there for security causes.
Will the combat towards spoofing at all times be an arms race?
Humphreys: There’s typically a trade-off between conventional security on the one hand—and alternatively, purposeful assaults from strategic adversaries. So it actually depends upon what you’re making an attempt to guard your self from. Is it that possibly one in every of 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 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 situation as “5 Questions for Todd Humphreys.”
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