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Researchers Find Crippling Flaws In Global GPS
mask.of.sanity writes "Researchers have developed attacks capable of crippling Global Positioning System infrastructure critical to the navigation of a host of military and civilian technologies including planes, ships and unamed drones. The novel remote attacks can be made against consumer and professional-grade receivers using $2500 worth of custom-built equipment. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Coherent Navigation detailed the attacks in a paper. (pdf)"
The paper isn't really about attacking GPS infrastructure. It's about attacking GPS receivers. Some of these receivers may be part of other sorts of infrastructure. I was at CCS when the paper was presented. It's all about sending fake GPS satellite signals to receivers to exploit bugs in the software in the receivers. The work is interesting and includes attacks which can desynchronize the clocks on some devices and there was one device you could essentially brick by telling it at the satellite was at radius 0 (center of the earth) resulting in a divide by 0 overflow. I liked the paper and thought it was neat, and it could do serious damage to particular systems which rely on GPS if they have the right type of flaws in their software to be exploited by this attack, but it was not an attack against the GPS satellites or anything like that.
This isn't news. The GPS signal is very, very weak. It's actually right at the noise floor and using some rather ingenious encoding to resolve the signal. The signal itself is fully-documented for consumer equipment. Given the weak signal strength and the protocol having no encryption or validation to speak of, of course jamming is possible; Receiver selectivity dictates it'll lock on to the strongest signal, the root square law dictates that just about any terrestrial source with line of sight will be stronger than the one in space. The only problem to work out then is processing; You have to figure out where the receiver is now, and then figure out where you want it to be, and adjust all the signals it could receive from the GPS satellites simultaniously to cause it to (falsely) lock on to the new position. And considering that the timing needs to be in fractions of a millisecond to have any value at all, you need to be very exact.
Most of the equipment is dedicated to computing what the signal needs to be.... the actual transmitter is dirt cheap.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Planes and Ships don't rely on GPS.
If you have a license to pilot any of them, you have learned how to navigate without.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
What the fuck is with the science press in Britain / Australia about the word "boffins"? Why does every single science article, without fail, have to have some supposedly clever pun or alliteration around the word? (Extra points for using the word astro-boffins.)
I've gotten to the point that if I see the word "boffins" in a science article, I immediately click away. Please make it stop!
heh, "unnamed" drones.
Also known as a HARM target.
Have gnu, will travel.
Some poor bugger drives to the wrong destination.
GPS isn't trusted. It's already known to be hackable.
It would be news if they hacked the anti-spoofing system the military has been using for the last 6 years
Spoofing the signals to make receivers mistake their position isn't the point of this report. It's the potential to brick the receivers which is new.
Infuriate left and right
GPS is also at the heart of many military precision guided missiles and shells.
They also don't use civilian GPS receivers and employ anti-spoofing technology in every single deployment. No missile relies entirely on GPS.
Up until about 3 years ago we in North America had another electronic navigation system in-place and operational: LORAN C.
The loran system -though not as precise as GPS- was in many respects much more difficult to jam. Upgrades were planned that would have improved the loran system; instead, in a spectacular case of "penny wise-pound foolish" the sysetm was turned off, and its infrastructure (think 'some of the tallest antenna masts ever built' ) quickly dismantled/destroyed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN
From Wikipedia:
"In November 2009, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that the LORAN-C stations under its control would be closed down for budgetary reasons after January 4, 2010 provided the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security certified that LORAN is not needed as a backup for GPS.[19]
On 7 January 2010, Homeland Security published a notice of the permanent discontinuation of LORAN-C operation. Effective 2000 UTC 8 February 2010, the United States Coast Guard terminated all operation and broadcast of LORAN-C signals in the USA...
[In the quoted Wikipedia article, the following paragraph was placed BEFORE the above]
Originally completed 20 March 2007 and presented to the co-sponsoring Department of Transportation and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Executive Committees, the report carefully considered existing navigation systems, including GPS. The unanimous recommendation for keeping the LORAN system and upgrading to eLORAN was based on the team's conclusion that LORAN is operational, deployed and sufficiently accurate to supplement GPS. The team also concluded that the cost to decommission the LORAN system would exceed the cost of deploying eLORAN, thus negating any stated savings as offered by the Obama administration and revealing the vulnerability of the U.S. to GPS disruption.[18]"
end of quoted Wikipedia material
Loran and its technological successor E-loran are still available in some more enlightened parts of the world (see linked article)
Note that I am a USian. The above is NOT one of my country's
more shining (dare I say 'brighter') decisions.
Researchers have developed attacks capable of crippling Global Positioning System infrastructure critical to the navigation of a host of military and civilian technologies including planes, ships and unamed drones.
What happens if they run "uname -a" then?
Seriously, you had to go that far, when they had "Global GPS" (yep, Global Global Positioning System) right in the headline?
Seriously though Slashdot management must have zero concern about low quality, sloppy, careless editing. I would fire in a heartbeat any so-called "editor" who can't even bother to run a spell-checker at least once in a while.
Yeah? YMBNH...
What an insult to everyone else who is expected to actually perform and do a good job to earn their paycheck. In this economy there are PLENTY of people who would do a better job and possibly for less money than what Slashdot staff are currently making. Perhaps they should start contacting Slashdot management and making offers? The current crop of "editors" would be no competition at all.
It is widely suspected that the current crew of /. do not receive a "paycheck" at all, but are paid in bananas, peanuts, or some such simian treat. But if you want them put away, feel free to contact the local zoo with a tip about their missing baboons....
The TEDxAustin talk you mentioned is focused on GPS spoofing to make a receiver think that it is somewhere else. Spoofing in that sense has been around for a long time, and while it is very cool and everything, it isn't what is novel about this paper/attack.
This paper goes from just making a GPS receiver think it is located somewhere else to actually exploiting software vulnerabilities in GPS receivers to cause them to crash and things like that. The attacks are related, but the position based spoofing is just a subset of this work.
They wrote a "uname" daemon that's hosted on aerial drones. But of course there's a flame war over whether to use Kdrone or Gdrone... .
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I can't fucking believe it. Do you mean to tell me that if you have a receiver tuned to a certain frequency, and you have a transmitter on that same frequency, then you can transmit information from the transmitter to the receiver?
Top it off though! If you have not one but two - TWO transmitters, and one is vastly more powerful than the other, then you can get the receiver to receive the stronger one over the weaker one?
Completely fucking amazing, if you ask me. I had no idea you could do something like that. It's almost like, when I'm at a party, I can hear the people who are talking louder better than I can hear the people who are being quiet, and stand a better chance of recovering the information they are conveying.
Wow. Whowouldathunkit?
At least he didn't say "Global GPS System".