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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
heh, "unnamed" drones.
Well okay but I work in air traffic control and there is a high level of relience on positonal information from GPS.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Commercial airliners are still equipped with other navigation systems, but most of them are beacon systems that are only useful when you're close to an airport. These systems are still used for landing. For long distance navigation, the non-GPS systems are almost all a distant memory. It's *possible* to navigate a plane with a compass and a clock, and if you're flying low enough (and in an area with enough airports) it's possible to navigate by switching beacons, but I wouldn't want to hazard that in a plane the size of most commercial airliners. It's the kind of thing you do (and are trained to do, or at least were when I was taking lessons) in a Cessna, not a 767.
The real concern is that the occupants of the plane have no way of knowing that their GPS information is bad in the first place. You can have a thousand backups available to you, but if you don't know that your primary system is being fed bad information, are you going to check/trust the backup that's based on technology developed a century ago (seriously... clock/compass is how Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were navigating)? And assuming that the GPS actually *crashed* (in the DoS way described in TFA), you'd still have Air Traffic Control to tell you where you were... they don't use GPS, they use radar.
True, but it's a daily problem for ATC in some parts of the world. North Korea jams GPS around ICN on a regular basis. Even EWR had a GPS issue for some time. They figured a trucker was using a GPS jammer to block the logger on the truck. Every time the truck would drive near the airport it would create a hassle.
It's the potential to brick the receivers which is new.
Which is why I find it interesting that 60% of the authors of the paper (3 out of 5) are employees of a commercial entity that.... creates "coherent" navigation equipment.
Perhaps it's just one big advertisement for their solutions?
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.