In 2023, a minimum of 20 civilian plane flying by means of 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, during which misleading alerts from the bottom, disguised as reliable alerts 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, during which malicious alerts overwhelm a focused GPS receiver till it will probably not perform.
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 will 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 subtle 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 seemingly 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 alerts that idiot GPS receivers for a whole bunch of kilometers across the nation.
How can spoofing be detected?
Humphreys: It’s provable that you just can’t, in all circumstances, detect spoofing. That’s as a result of GPS is a one-way system. It broadcasts alerts, but it surely doesn’t take any enter from the receivers. So there’s all the time the opportunity of someone broadcasting a lookalike sign and fooling a receiver.
How can airways cut back the possibilities 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 alerts 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 mentioned, “Look, I’d wish to give you a method of mixing the alerts from these two totally different antennas in order that you could possibly extra readily detect spoofing.” They usually identified that it was essential for his or her programs that these antennas function completely independently as a result of they’re there for redundancy. They’re there for security causes.
Will the combat in opposition to spoofing all the time be an arms race?
Humphreys: There’s usually a trade-off between conventional security on the one hand—and alternatively, 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 among your inner 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 battle zone and having your GPS receiver spoofed with out realizing? Sadly, it’s powerful to deal with each of those issues with the identical {hardware} on the similar time.
This text seems within the January 2025 challenge as “5 Questions for Todd Humphreys.”
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