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Cyber Threats Prompt Return of Radio For Ship Navigation (reuters.com)
Jonathan Saul reports via Reuters: The risk of cyber attacks targeting ships' satellite navigation is pushing nations to delve back through history and develop back-up systems with roots in World War Two radio technology. Ships use GPS (Global Positioning System) and other similar devices that rely on sending and receiving satellite signals, which many experts say are vulnerable to jamming by hackers. About 90 percent of world trade is transported by sea and the stakes are high in increasingly crowded shipping lanes. Unlike aircraft, ships lack a back-up navigation system and if their GPS ceases to function, they risk running aground or colliding with other vessels. South Korea is developing an alternative system using an earth-based navigation technology known as eLoran, while the United States is planning to follow suit. Britain and Russia have also explored adopting versions of the technology, which works on radio signals.
Cyber specialists say the problem with GPS and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is their weak signals, which are transmitted from 12,500 miles above the Earth and can be disrupted with cheap jamming devices that are widely available. Developers of eLoran - the descendant of the loran (long-range navigation) system created during World War II - say it is difficult to jam as the average signal is an estimated 1.3 million times stronger than a GPS signal. To do so would require a powerful transmitter, large antenna and lots of power, which would be easy to detect, they add.
Cyber specialists say the problem with GPS and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is their weak signals, which are transmitted from 12,500 miles above the Earth and can be disrupted with cheap jamming devices that are widely available. Developers of eLoran - the descendant of the loran (long-range navigation) system created during World War II - say it is difficult to jam as the average signal is an estimated 1.3 million times stronger than a GPS signal. To do so would require a powerful transmitter, large antenna and lots of power, which would be easy to detect, they add.
Tried, tested, already developed. Why is a new version needed?
This sounds right, I have got to get myself an ham radio again some day...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I'm surprised, but not really surprised, that modern commercial shipping doesn't have reliable backup systems - that's what the article seems to imply. I mean, how does a commercial sea-going ship's captain get certified without knowing some basic navigation skills - dead-reckoning, anyone?
Fair enough, dead-reckoning probably wouldn't suffice to avoid collisions in a major shipping channel, but still, you should be able to avoid the dry bits without having to rely on GPS. You can always turn on lots of flashing lights if you've lost communications - someone will come to help.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
> the descendant of the loran (long-range navigation) system created during World War II
Nope. That was LORAN, later known as Loran-A. eLORAN is a slightly upgraded Loran-C, which was entirely post-war. They are similar in name only and worked on entirely different techniques and frequencies.
This old but effective technology has been discontinued for sea navigation around 1990 to be replaced by Loran-C and GPS. Although not so accurate, it was very reliable, and cheap to mantain and use. LF beacons still survive for aerial navigation, although the transmitter number has been significantly reduced recently. It wouldn't be that bad to have them ready to be switched on when needed.
> Unlike aircraft, ships lack a back-up navigation system
Really? Ships had pretty reliable means of open sea navigation for at good 1000++y before GPS and even before the first aircraft, gradually improved trough the centuries. Paper maps, magnetic compass, more or less accurate clocks, tools for optical measurements? Whatever happened to them?
LORAN is good, but it is just as vulnerable as GPS and is pretty much the same basic technology, having infrastructure on the ground instead of space.
OTOH, sun/star/compass-based navigation can be improved by modern technology and still work autonomously on the ship. The fog and the clouds, preventing optical measurements by naked eye are almost non-issue in infrared. And more, now we have modern laser gyroscopes and precise accelerometers for a good inertial add-ons.
No matter what radio based technology you have, RF can be jammed- just pump enough energy into the air- and the closer you are to the target, the easier it is. The downside to jamming of that method is that it is really obvious. A better method is to produce an accurate, but wrong signal. If you want to create a trustworthy RF navigation system the signal must be authenticated. Most forget that the GPS system in our cell-phones is only the first step of the actual military system- it gives you a good estimate so you can switch to the more precise encrypted signal (rotating keys that are classified and have a pseudo-noise sequence that never repeats in the valid lifetime of the key, which is on the order of months).
Without a method to prevent spoofing via a verifiable chain of trust, the system dead before it begins.
You've been fooled into thinking satellites exist, by a science fiction author.
No backup system? You mean the sun and the stars have gone away?
It worked for me when I crossed the Atlantic.
Not terribly accurate though, Loran or its modern update would be nice.
"Cats like plain crisps"
This discussion is a little bit stupid / misdirected. The point is not that Loran is inherently more secure or unjammable than GPS. If someone wanted to jam it in the vicinity of a receiver it could be done.
The point is that GPS is jammed because it helps localize within centimeters, which unlocks a lot of capabilities that an enemy is interested in disabling.
If Loran did that too, they would go after *that*. Loran doesn't matter to most anyone today aside from ships, because its level of accuracy is hundreds of meters.
Make something shitty enough, and no one will care if you can jam it or not.
Because, regulations, so the LORAN system will be *piss easy* to jam, just like GPS, simply because there will hardly be any power used, so say this will be something (because it's sea) like 50W, heck, even 100W, it's still going to be easy for anyone to pump 1kW+ through a linear amp and ruin the data signal
You could probably still do it with 50W as well,.... doesn't take much to ruin a data signal now.
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So what's the threat?
Threat 1: Someone jams your gps and you know you have a problem and do something about it.
Seems like not much benefit to the bad guys.
It might make some shipping lanes more inconvenient, but doesn't seem like much of a threat.
Threat 2: Someone spoofs your GPS and your ship goes to the wrong place.
Now there's an interesting threat.
But it seems like an easy thing to prevent.
Unless someone takes out the whole GPS system, the good guys don't have to fix threat 2, only make it into a threat 1.
Plan A: Spread multiple gps receivers across the ship and make sure they think they continue to have the correct spacial relation to each other.
It would be very hard for a jamer to get this right.
Plan B: Use directional antennas for the GPS receiver so the jammer has to use lots of power or be above the ship to get any effect.
Plan C: Use the radar when the ship is in close quarters.
Plan D: Perhaps a star tracker, dead reckoning, and a computer to do automatic celestial position verification.
Plan E: Use radio direction finding with existing broadcast stations, again with a computer to make it automatic.
Plan E: Break out Bowditch and do your job as Captain manually.
I just don't see why restarting Loran helps big ships with competent captains.
It might help the landlubbers who have grown addicted to GPS.
So the real use case here is either everybody but the big ships, or a strategic choice not to put all the eggs in one basket.
commercial shipping wants a robo captain
Unlike aircraft, ships lack a back-up navigation system and if their GPS ceases to function, they risk running aground or colliding with other vessels.
Anyone who sails out of sight of shore without a backup navigation system (even a sextant) is a weapons grade idiot.
Sextants can be better than most people think. The wikipedia article says "A highly skilled and experienced navigator can determine position to an accuracy of about 0.25-nautical-mile (460 m)" Although results in the 1-nautical-mile range are common for less experienced operators. Even that is perfectly usable for navigating across an ocean, and when within sight of land local landmarks and charts can be used.
People actually did navigate at sea before GPS and LORAN.
You don't send anything to GPS satellites, it is totally passive receive. They output radio signals at about 60W which is why it takes so long to "lock." Makes me question the authenticity of the rest of the summary of the article.
Time to dust off the old Sextant?
does not happen by GPS, by normal vision or radar.
Avoiding collisions by GPS would be reckless and violate international law. (Since it would require all vessels to have a transponder, incluing small ones or ones without motor/steering).
Navigating in shipping routes close to coasts/harbors happens by Buoys.
So yes, ships have an alternative system.
About the hypothesis that GPS is easier to jam, i would have to think a little bit.
Until we develop a way to block, or spoof, the sun and the stars there is a reliable and accurate backup for navigation. You need a precise time piece, sextant, nautical almanac, and charts along with a mariner who knows how to shoot the stars. The Nav on a frigate I was on did a daily celestial fix to double check our position with the radio fix. he could get a set of readings very quickly so the line of position produced a very tiny box for our fix. I'd bet my life on his fix before the radio fix.
The downside is you need to be trained and practice to keep sharp. I used to be good at it but couldn't get a fix to save my life now. With computers you could input the readings and get it to give you lat/long so there is no need to draw LOP on a paper chart. In a pinch you could send that out as you position.
Automation has caused mariners to lose skills that served our forebears well. One favorite drill a friend ran was to tell the crew GPS was down - now navigate for the next few hours the old way. Lots of head scratching and moaning when he did that. There's a lot to be said for keeping proven, if time consuming, skills sharp for when all the latest stuff goes south.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
That's straight out of Battlestar Galactica! Great idea, too. In fact, we could probably all benefit from some downgrading. ;) I personally will never have in my home any IoT devices (a relative of mine can build stuff like that from scratch, no need to buy all the spyware) or virtual assistance products (my brain works fine, I'm not so remedial I can't decode a kid's bedtime story or do the math of measurement in my head). I will never have a dumb smart home, either. One bolt of lightning or an overgrown tree and suddenly my entire domicile is useless. Nor a smart car. This stuff was never the best version of the future, just yet another way for corporations to harvest data and exploit people's growing stupidity. Same situation with state-controlled public wifi. Wouldn't be at all surprised if they ban VPNs at some point on that nonsense, with a typical bullshit excuse.
It's called a compass, sextant, and clock.
I good pair of eyes from an alert crew person on watch.
Since when does RF jamming have anything to do with hackers or "cyber threats". Clickbait headlines I guess.
Also jamming GPS would require at least line of sight to the receiver if the jammer is on the surface of the earth. Microwave signals don't go over the horizon. If you are jamming a ship at sea, you are either a nation state or a sophisticated pirate(I mean the real ones).
As far as LORAN-C goes, in many regards this is EASIER to jam since it is using LF bands, around 200kHz. Jamming at low frequencies can be a lot easier due to groundwave and skywave propagation, allowing the jammer to be much further away. That said, the antennas required to transmit LF frequencies are quite enormous in length.
One favorite drill a friend ran was to tell the crew GPS was down - now navigate for the next few hours the old way. Lots of head scratching and moaning when he did that. There's a lot to be said for keeping proven, if time consuming, skills sharp for when all the latest stuff goes south.
With good charts-which any naval or merchant ship should have-if the GPS goes out couldn't you just take your last known position and use your heading, speed, and time to plot out a decently accurate idea of where you are anyway? It might not be accurate enough closer to shore but in deep water it should be serviceable until GPS is restored.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Ground based infrastructure is always going to be more resilient than something on a satellite.
GPS uses a 50W signal that is 20,000 km+ away. Loran can use many KW and will at most be a few thousand km away, in the most critical scenarios it will be 10s or 100s of km. This makes it harder but still not impossible to jam.
Its also going to be easier to repair a damaged Loran transmitter than a damaged satellite in the event of some kind of fault occurring.
Until we develop a way to block, or spoof, the sun and the stars .....
Nature already developed it, they are called clouds!
One favorite drill a friend ran was to tell the crew GPS was down - now navigate for the next few hours the old way. Lots of head scratching and moaning when he did that. There's a lot to be said for keeping proven, if time consuming, skills sharp for when all the latest stuff goes south.
With good charts-which any naval or merchant ship should have-if the GPS goes out couldn't you just take your last known position and use your heading, speed, and time to plot out a decently accurate idea of where you are anyway? It might not be accurate enough closer to shore but in deep water it should be serviceable until GPS is restored.
Sure, dead reckoning can be used ,in fact that's what we did to plot our projected position, but its accuracy dwindles over time, due to currents, course and speed changes, etc. I would not want to have to use it to ensure we hit a known position at some point in he future.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is funny, because aircraft are still being forced to GPS-only navigation as Lockheed shuts down the VOR navigation system to cut costs.
I'm so glad they have a backup for a ship. Now if they could just figure out one for the Web..
Isn't this what the Radar is for? If the Radar goes out, you post some people as look-outs.
So it may get down to a Multi Billion dollar ship having to rely on a guy with a Compass and Sextent??
It may not be as accurate as GPS/Radio Beacons but...
(cue POTC theme here)
Ships have several backup systems. One is map and sextant if you want the end fallback. Another is radio triangulation. Yeah, you can use a loop antenna to get a bearing from a commercial radio station broadcasting from a known position. Get bearings from three, and you have a rather exact position. Loran is an automated version of doing the manual bearings I just described.
GPS is a very good convenience for navigation. But, if that is the only way you know how to navigate; you need a Sea Daddy to teach you how to be an adult seafarer.
NRRPT/RCT