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$30 GPS Jammer Can Wreak Havok
An anonymous reader writes "A simple $30 GPS jammer made in China can ruin your day. It doesn't just affect your car's navigation — ATM machines, cell phone towers, plane, boat, train navigation systems all depend upon GPS signals that are easily blocked. These devices fail badly — with no redundancy. These jammers can be used to defeat vehicle tracking products — but end up causing a moving cloud of chaos. The next wave of anti-GPS devices include GPS spoofers to trick or confuse nearby devices."
How do I get one?
GPS guided ordnance seems absurdly vulnerable to jamming and interference to me.
My atlas is immune!
What's next? Anti-anti GPS devices?
I guess the "Death by GPS" will be a lot more common now.
Slashdot "editor": no dictionary required
Such a device already exists. It's called "Indianapolis." I swear, I can never get good GPS signal in that damn town.
these are illegal i guess?
a device jamming technology X doesnt just disturb one type of device dependent on that technology, no, it jams ALL devices depending on X
News at eleven..
People, what a bunch of bastards
What's even more disturbing is that the FAA is currently looking to move away from traditional radar and even human air traffic controllers, as part of their "NextGen" system. GPS is just fine as long as there is a redundancy in the system. But the idea of abandoning radar as if GPS were a time-tested system is a little scary.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Anti-satellite lasers they have over in China? Scary. Now we need anti-proliferation treaties for laser tech too. Scary.
$30 GPS Jammer Can Wreak Havok[sic]
(Technical): ...which is why they are illegal in nearly every regulatory environment.
(Snide): Gee, I didn't realize a GPS jammer could break an Intel SDK! Oh -- you meant havoc?
ok.... who fed the timecube site into a chatbot ?
Why would ATMs need GPS for accurate timing?
The ability to white-noise (or pink-noise) jam GPS has been around and employed for, literally, years. And, most of the first of these I saw came from China, too. GPS is a relatively fragile system, at least n the L1-C/A world: GPS satellites have limited power budgets so signal levels are low on the ground. Receivers have high gain. Multipath in urban environments can confuse receivers. Emitting a random noise signal over the range of L1 frequencies isn't that hard, and doesn't take much power... or antenna height... to cause problems.
The article makes all of these points. Read it and take note of the fragility of the system. That's its downfall, not a $30 device.
Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by tenure.
messing with air-traffic controllers can get you some hard time. I think it's federal pound you in the ass time.
they can be used to trick china and great britain to the brink of war by fooling the royal navy into invading chinese waters. then a stealth boat can make the other side think someone is shooting missiles at them. all of course, so rupert murdoch, i mean, uh, elliot carver, can sell... newspapers!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is being used against my Galaxy S all the time!
There's frozen pizzas on sale down at the store.
Ya but it can also disable your "theoretical" enemy's comms long enough to get in a nasty sneak attack. (Fuzzing GPS in general not just air traffic controllers.)
The article just highlights why radio/microwave interference is taken so seriously by authorities. The fact a jammer costs $30 is moot, buying a jammer is illegal and stupid.
How much gunpowder could you buy for $30 (or just raw ingredients for bombs)?
says that the Navy did this by accident and wiped out vital systems in a whole metropolitan region. Who would have thought that armed groups with very little regulatory control would be such a risk to the civilian population? The $30 device from China story just seems to be some spin to make it sound as though hackers and criminals who buy this sort of thing, and the Chinese government, who don't regulate properly, are the real dangers. In fact it is our own armed forces.
Korma: Good
I'm not surprised by how many devices would use GPS(the ability to get a fairly accurate location fix and a damn accurate timebase for peanuts and an OK view of the sky is certainly attractive...); but I am surprised, a bit, at how many "serious" systems(even ones where hostile action is to be expected, like ATMs, or where failure Just Isn't Acceptable, like air traffic control) wouldn't have some degree of redundancy, if only because of the risk of a cheap GPS module burning some sensitive RF chip because the local arc-welder user fired up again...
Your basic RTC, say, isn't as accurate as GPS time; especially in the long term, or if not temperature compensated and subject to variable conditions; but it should still deviate by less than a second over a day or two of lost GPS(never mind 10-60 minutes of jamming) and can, if needed, retain reasonably accurate time for as long as power holds out, and they don't need much power.
Similarly, today's MEMS accelerometers and on-chip magnetometers/compasses, while you might not want to dead-reckon your way around the world with them, can easily enough compensate for losses in GPS fix over the short term, and can 'sanity-check' abrupt changes in GPS readings.
For static objects(like radar towers) you can basically treat position as a constant(possibly with recalibration from time to time if there are structural shifts) and calculate dish position based on a simple rotary encoder or the like.
Obviously, for space, power, and cost reasons, Joe Consumer's $50 cellphone or $80 dash-nav isn't necessarily going to incorporate multiple layers of GPS failsafe. If the GPS stops working, Joe can just use the meat-coprocessor he stores in his skull to suck it up and figure it out until GPS comes back online.
For more important systems, though, I would honestly have hoped for better, especially in situations(like cell towers and most ATMs) where the equipment itself isn't exactly inexpensive, so $50 or $100 worth of accelerometer and RTC failsafe would be reasonable, and where they usually have a network hard-line. NTP isn't perfect; but it certainly is handy(if necessary, users of dedicated circuits, rather than those who rely on public internet, might be able to achieve even greater accuracy by comparing their GPS time with the GPS time reported by the hardware on the other end of the circuit, to determine the round-trip time fairly exactly...)
Also, the "backup" gyrocompass mentioned in TFA, that failed to act as a backup to GPS because it crashed when it lost GPS signal is just sad. Perhaps it was purchased from the same company who provides emergency generators that can only be started by mains-powered control systems?
I want to just mount one of these on my mailbox so I can give my address to people using GPS to find me and say "when your GPS freaks out, you're here."
we're guessing they probably do not have to bother with endless time stealing 'meetings', PR blitzkriegs, increasing feign of indecision crap, like we do. remember, they knew we might get stuck/end badly, like this, & they DO plan ahead...... since/until forever (by any 'calendar' we're familiar with?) there's some notion that we could delay/prevent our rescue? there are provisions?
Why would an ATM need GPS? Isn't their IP address sufficient? How idiotic to think an ATM
needs anything else other than a secure, encrypted connection.
Oh wait, there must be many ATM thieves who take the machines from their original location
and reconnect them to the grid. LOL
Basically equivalent to the thing where you shine a pointed laser in somebody's cockpit. Retards find it hilarious, and we have another hidden danger we shouldn't have to worry about.
http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=gps+jammer&catId=0
Last week South Korea believes North Korea was testing their new GPS jammer from Russia.
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/03/07/2011030700567.html
If you bothered to read past the first page, you would have found out that the $30 box from the evil empire was shutting down Newark Airport twice a day because a truck driver was using it to defeat the toll transponder on the NJ Turnpike next door.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
The article mentions LORAN and eLORAN. The USG in it's infinite wisdom decommissioned the LORAN system. So that option is out.
Finland has had plans to introduce a road toll system based on GPS. If that happens, spoofing/jamming GPS will save you a lot of money. As a side-effect of everyone using blocking devices, nobody will be able to navigate anymore :)
it says that it was causing one particular software application to shut down, not the airport itself.
Korma: Good
yes.. those thousands of "fill in" auxiliary transmitters for broadband access in the same general band as GPS will effectively jam most consumer GPS receivers.
testing conducted by LightSquared seems not to see any problems, testing conducted by Garmin does.
THis is also a big deal for the zillions of systems using GPS for time distribution and synchronization.
Jammers have to broadcast a relatively large amount of power in order to work. More than enough to attract passive-homing ordnance...
People forgot about it due to the ong solar minimum, but if this many things are dependant upon GPS, they're going to want to find some contingency plans:
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
If you really want to mess with ATC, you can do it far easier than a $30.00 short range jammer.
Go to hobby shop, buy a few large model rockets. build them.
Go to grocery store, buy a roll of aluminum foil.
feed aluminum foil into a crosscut paper shredder to create "chaff". (I can tell you how to do this successfully, but wont to keep the complete idiots from trying it.)
Load the chaff into the ejection chute tube for the model rockets. (again, there is more to this, but idiots will never figure this step out as well.)
Launch. laugh with your buddies and get ready to enjoy your time being anally raped by big bad bubba in a federal prison.
This will screw with ATC in a big BIG way. they will find you, they will taze you about 900 times on the way to the jail, then they will taze you just for fun, and the judge will taze you out of spite in the courtroom, your lawyer will also probably taze you as well, before you go to a big bad prison.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What competent engineer would design an important system that depends on GPS, with no backup? The satellite signals are very faint, and can be disrupted for seconds or hours by lots of different causes, including entirely natural causes like solar flares.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This is just what we need, a cheap way for idiots to troll OpenStreetMap surveyors...
Furries make the internet go.
I'd ask if you were new here, but your low ID gives it away.
You're dumb if you couldnt understand the blurb. I hate english majors claiming they cant understand english just because it isnt written according to a rigid set of rules that are, in fact, NOT needed to understand what is written. Some are needed. All are not. Learn to adapt.
Nobody at Slashdot reads these things. That's why the Dance with Dragons story from a few days ago had a summary that was proven completely wrong by the very first line of TFA.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I suspect this would not change the outcome of the story at all, as many systems also depend on working GSM modems. IIRC there was a story about people stealing SIM cards from traffic lights not long ago.
Actually this one was pretty clear to me and actually seemed to at least be related to the article, which seems to be the hard part these days with the editors.
The GPS spoofer could also be used for lawful purposes, like providing GPS signal in tunnels and similar places.
HermesPod: Free Podcast Download Manager for Windows
World Time clocks, usually provided by some standards institute. Duh!
GPS is NOT a clock. It MAY include one, but that is not the main function of GPS,
it is an aside issue. "yeah, we include realtime data in our GPS system".
Future versions of position-detection-systems can be cryptographically authenticated to prevent spoofing.
I don't see any reasonable way to totally prevent jamming though. About the best you can do is use accelerometers and the like to guess where you are related to your last known position, and/or have the computer alert the user that it is no longer certain of its location.
As far as ATM machines and the like go, if the ATM machine "phones home" with its authenticated location once a minute, and the phone-home stops, "home" can raise an alarm.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You could want one to be a terrorist instead.
That's several orders of magnitude worse, and a "whole 'nuther category", than just merely being an asshole.
GPS is a Global POSITIONING SYSTEM. It may have a clock associated with it...but it is not a clock per se.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
These jammers attack Layer 1 of the OSI. Encryption takes place at Layer 6.
In other words, encrypting GPS would be a wasted effort against these jamming devices.
Life is not for the lazy.
Will they jam that too plox
TFA talks about disruption caused by a US Navy communications jamming exercise. Naval electronic warfare devices can be hardly compared to "30$ chinese GPS jammer".
I for one find it impossible to believe that an ATM machine could fail with no redundancy!
Not me, but, ohhh the possibilities. World domination... The humiliation of my enemies...
Well, you've certainly given me a lot to think about!
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
six? moran
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
People keep forgetting something very important in these articles. The interference occurs on the radio antenna NOT with the signal itself. Airborne (or spaceborn) radio frequency energy does NOT interact with other signals on the same frequency. Therefore it is possible to receive the original signal free of jamming. The problem is the induction reception method. The radio reads the induction from the antenna. A second signal causes a "false induction" at the antenna which effectively "jams" the receiver even though the original signal exists, unmolested. The solution is a non induction method of radio reception and a smart receiver that can distinguish the original signal from the other ones being broadcast.
http://www.spectracomcorp.com/ProductsServices/TimingSynchronization/GPSTimeFrequencyReferences/tabid/117/Default.aspx
http://www.tekroninternational.com/gps_clocks
http://www.trimble.com/timing/mini-t.aspx?dtID=overview&
and for the gold:
http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/time/gps/gps-info#tt
You're telling me that, for thirty dollars, I can own a device that will loose a mutant capable of controlling powerful plasma blasts???
'Cause, see....HavoK is Cyclops' brother, as opposed to, y'know...havoC. Like general disarray.
This is why we can't have nice things.
All that is "far easier" than spending $30?
Do these GPS transmitters be really up in space? Would it be possible to set up terrestrial transmitters, on mountain tops, tall buildings etc and increase the signal strength?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That is basically an 'ooooh scary' bullshit article by a guy that doesn't really know anything. All systems that use GPS have some form of redundancy.
How about reading the fine article instead of making a fool out of yourself?
Oh wait, this is Slashdot, one can just throw crap out and expect other to explain. Open the text, search for the second time ATM pops up and you get an idea of what it used the GPS for.
The system from which the idea came in order to make the GPS was terrestrial, but it has its own limitations.
Nowadays there is something called Differential GPS which improves the error margin of GPS, but it's not an independent system on itself.
You should do some research on this low-tech navigational system. More and more stations with these senders are being shut down. How expensive could it be to have these senders broadcasting? Russia actually had to persuade Norway to leave this system operational.
These jammers can be used to defeat vehicle tracking products — but end up causing a moving cloud of chaos
Ah, unintended consequences. This is also why you don't want to just jam any technology that annoys you. Think about that the next time you're gritting your teeth over a ringing phone.
A simple solution exists that would prevent these problems, but our government won't fund it (even at 1/24th the cost of GPS) because it's military uses are more limited. Again, billions for blowing up brown people and bailing out fat bankers, not a penny for the general welfare.
$30.00 jammer will do absolutely nothing unless you get past security with it and get near the tower or other aviation gear or in the plane. Spend $30.00 get device, tress pass and sneak it past security, contrary to your video game experience, it's a whole lot harder to do in real life.
Or are you simply an idio,t and think it's a magical $30.00 device and all you have to do is switch it on?
Yeah lumpy's outline is far easier as it can be done within a few miles of the airport at leisure.
This article deals with what happens when GPS is disrupted due to a localised jammer. Sounds like some serious chaos.
So... what happens when we have a major solar flare that disables a few GPS satellites entirely? Can we expect entire nations to suddenly lose their ATM networks, shipping navigation and air traffic control?
Oh goody. I can't wait for the solar cycle to get going again. And there was me thinking the only thing we had to look forward to were better aurora. :-/
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
the post isn't about how to best mess with ATC systems it is about how overreliance on GPS without paying attention to the fact it is failure prone in rl situations and pointing out drawbacks predicated to get worse since. It is feasable people could have jammers such as truckers but when it comes to chaff launchers, floating clusters of foil balloons around runways, explosives etc etc there isn't any reason significant number of Joe Public's are going to be packing them in their car for some other minor infringement such as avoiding tolls. Such things are not uncommon and are thought of as being as "heavy" as stealing cable TV in the minds of many people, the consequences people are oblivious to and completely ignorant of which is more the point of the article. I mean as far as major disruption to cost ratio goes you can shut down an entire airport for the price of a phone call and all you need is to speak a few magic words to get your ass deservedly I may add locked up hopefully in state prison.
My video game experience? Really? I have *actually* been in restricted areas of an international airport. I guarantee you I could have brought that device with me.
they will taze you about 900 times on the way to the jail, then they will taze you just for fun, and the judge will taze you out of spite in the courtroom, your lawyer will also probably taze you as well, before you go to a big bad prison.
Another bad day, eh, Lumpy?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/143089-fcc-cracks-down-on-cell-phone-a-gps-jamming-devices
and more here
http://www.google.com/search?q=fcc+cell+phone+jammer+letter
http://www.google.com/search?q=fcc+gps+phone+jammer+letter
So if you're a theater owner or office manager and think one of these at $50 is a good bargain, think about $10,000 and two years in jail instead.
Remember that GPS is high frequency and relatively easily shielded. An aircraft can easily be shielded from terrestrial signals and signals from the ground. Many sports bars in the heyday of C band satellite TV put the dishes on the roof, often exposing them to terrestrial microwave links. This is why it was common to see a chain link fence lined with screening on the roof of many downtown buildings.
Normal windshield mount devices are a sitting duck for ground based transmitters. Some Onstar vehicles have upward facing antennas with reasonable side shielding.
The truth shall set you free!
The problem with gas taxes is the differences in gas mileage. And if you have an electric car, you wouldn't be paying a gas tax.
You could, however, avoid having to use GPS monitoring and simply report the total miles traveled based on odometer readings. I believe that there are laws in place that prohibit tinkering with odometer readings, especially if you are reselling a vehicle. And odds are that a road-use tax would have provisions to handle possible cheating, with penalties that make it unprofitable.
There are other tax options available, but gas taxes and road-use taxes tend to be a bit more fair than most because they are based on usage and the actual wear and tear on the road, especially if the road-use taxes take into consideration the weight of the vehicle.
but guns are not illegal
It has been brought to my attention that guns are not illegal, therefore I need to issue an emergency update to my last message.
So, for now, until proper studies are done l will change the statement:
'Like drugs and guns, which we now have none of.'
to
Like unprescribed narcotics and types of guns that are not legal without a permit in some jurisdictions, of which there is a bustling underground criminal economy, which is why making devices like the above illegal may not have a remediable effect on the problem listed in the original story.
I'll follow up with a list of sources later on, I do hope I get an A+ on this paper.
PS: You are an idiot.
PPS: Since I didn't actually sign the message, the PS above isn't really a PS and shouldn't be viewed as one for the purpose of proper letter writing standards. Your mental abilities, however may still lack, and my further suggestion of 'go play in traffic' should be viewed as a colorful metaphor and not as an actual request complete with directions to the nearest Interstate highway.
Or are you simply an idio,t and think it's a magical $30.00 device and all you have to do is switch it on?
OK, sure, it's not enough to switch it on. According to FA, you then have to drive past the airport on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Until Feb 2010 we had a less accurate but still, for many purposes useful, backup system called LORAN C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN . In order to save the princely sum of 35 million a year, the system was turned off. Substantial effort was then made to render it impractical and expensive to bring the LORAN system back online (e.g. the destruction of transmit antennas). . To answer the parent question,: NO competent engineer (or navigator) would willingly design a or use known-unreliable system without for life- or mission- critical functions without backup. This decision was made politicians, not by engineers --- or navigators.
Figure that the Navy exercise was one that uncovered some of the flaws in the overall GPS system. They just happened to be using a jammer that was more powerful than the Chinese made $30 jammers. They learned, the hard way, that jammers affect civilian life too, in ways that people don't understand unless they are intimately involved in the field.
I suspect that all military forces are now aware of such things and are adapting their tactics to deal with it. The Navy just happened to be unlucky in the fact that they did the test in the harbor and not further out at sea. Similar testing done by the Army, Air Force or Marines would likely be done in a more isolated environment, where you can simulate battlefield conditions and not be right next door to a major metropolitan area.
...but where can I buy it??
When listening to half of a conversation, just remember not to laugh too loud when the person says something really stupid. They are likely to accuse you of eavesdropping on what they consider to be a private conversation, oblivious to the fact that half the world can hear them.
If you want to protect yourself from said accusations, carry along a book of jokes or access a jokes website. That way, if they accuse you of invading their privacy in a public place, you can 'prove' that you were doing something else and accuse THEM of invading your privacy.
Alas, there are undoubtedly people out there that are self centered enough to think they they have a right to privacy in a public place while you don't.
The Carver Media Group had a GPS spoofer and managed to steer a British warship into Chinese waters. James Bond already cleaned that mess up.
It is NOT acceptable for lack of GPS to cause havoc. Especially in San Diego of all places... Where Navy ships have a habbit of continuously emitting harmful interference.
Not for the jammer itself, but considering that a fair portion of the synchronization networks around the world depends on GPS this is kind of scary.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
OMG THANK YOU!
I'm so glad that some people pointed this out, I have directly addressed your concerns in an emergency update post above. Feel free to read it as if it was addressed directly to you.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2027768&cid=35421260
In the future, I will strive to increase the technical accuracy of any one line quips. I promise I'll get to it, right after I rewind my DVD's before returning them to the video store.
messing with air-traffic controllers can get you some hard time. I think it's federal pound you in the ass time.
So your going to put the Sun in the federal pound. Sun spot max is going to be interesting
Thanks to cronyism at the FCC, we're about to start jamming GPS everywhere, on a perfectly legal basis.
This is what happens when you hire politicians to do engineering work.
Nothing a $30 dictionary couldn't have prevented.
you had me at #!
State prisons are where all the murders, bank robbers, and rapists go. Federal Prisons have a larger percentage of White Collar Criminals, I think.
I've always been annoyed by that mistake that Office Space only compounded.
Their radar isn't that sensitive. If you aren't running a transponder (which screams out "YO DAWG I'M N545CF HERE I AM!!!!" and "HEY HEY HEY HEY MR. AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER LOOK AT MEEEEEE" when you ident) they can't see you. They can't see a King Air, they aren't going to see a few strips of aluminum foil.
I though systems that can separate signals by direction were fairly standard engineering these days? And GPS is a weak signal at a frequency easily blocked in built up areas, so wouldn't multi-path ability help improve reception? I can understand why this would affect old systems, but why are modern GPS receivers so... primitive?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
If GPS units are manufactured and designed to Part 15 of the FCC's regulatory code to accept all interference, then shouldn't the GPS just be relocated out of harm's way until it start's working again?
There might be a nearby transmitting utility that simply was licensed by a competitor the FCC, and the FCC should consider that there are existing transmitters that have been using those frequencies longer before FCC ever arrived. I think FCC should relocate to Port-Parah-Salin, Alaska.
Or send all GPS receivers there at-least. If you can't use a map, you got probrems. |-]
Ok, there's this chicken crossing a road, and without going into detail on avian thought, most people believe it wanted to get to the other side.
In our upcoming 12 part series on road crossing chickens, we can delve into this in detail.
These mobile jammers are so popular today!!! And it is so hard to choose one!
James
http://www.jammer-store.com/