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Russia Suspected In GPS-Spoofing Attacks On Ships (wired.co.uk)
How did a 37-ton tanker suddenly vanish from GPS off the coast of Russia? AmiMoJo shares a report from Wired:
The ship's systems located it 25 to 30 miles away -- at Gelendzhik airport... The Atria wasn't the only ship affected by the problem... At the time, Atria's AIS system showed around 20 to 25 large boats were also marooned at Gelendzhik airport. Worried about the situation, captain Le Meur radioed the ships. The responses all confirmed the same thing: something, or someone, was meddling with the their GPS...
After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. "We would find very large oil tankers who could travel at the maximum speed at 15 knots," said a former director for Marine Transportation Systems at the U.S. Coast Guard. "Their AIS, which is powered by GPS, would be saying they had sped up to 60 to 65 knots for an hour and then suddenly stopped. They had done that several times"...
"It looks like a sophisticated attack, by somebody who knew what they were doing and were just testing the system..." says Lukasz Bonenberg from the University of Nottingham's Geospatial Institute. "You basically need to have atomic level clocks."
The U.S. Maritime Administration confirms 20 ships have been affected -- all traveling in the Black Sea -- though a U.S. Coast Guard representative "refused to comment on the incident, saying any GPS disruption that warranted further investigation would be passed onto the Department of Defence." But the captain of the 37-ton tanker already has his own suspicions. "It looks like the Russians define an area where they don't want the GPS to apply."
After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. "We would find very large oil tankers who could travel at the maximum speed at 15 knots," said a former director for Marine Transportation Systems at the U.S. Coast Guard. "Their AIS, which is powered by GPS, would be saying they had sped up to 60 to 65 knots for an hour and then suddenly stopped. They had done that several times"...
"It looks like a sophisticated attack, by somebody who knew what they were doing and were just testing the system..." says Lukasz Bonenberg from the University of Nottingham's Geospatial Institute. "You basically need to have atomic level clocks."
The U.S. Maritime Administration confirms 20 ships have been affected -- all traveling in the Black Sea -- though a U.S. Coast Guard representative "refused to comment on the incident, saying any GPS disruption that warranted further investigation would be passed onto the Department of Defence." But the captain of the 37-ton tanker already has his own suspicions. "It looks like the Russians define an area where they don't want the GPS to apply."
it can still be jammed
That's why the USN has started teaching Old School navigation methods again.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Wrong. Russia already spoofs GPS signals around Moscow to make it look like you're at the airport - sounds a lot like this. You can google the Moscow GPS events if you want.
There is indeed a separate higher resolution encrypted feed for the military. Encrypting for civilian channel use is very impractical as many many devices lack the ability to update keys (no network connection). Encryption also burn clocks and batteries. With billions of devices being made all over the world by thousands of manufacturers keeping the keys private is unrealistic. Further with only one global key to crack by state supported entities it would not last long. (yes, the old /. meme of "imagine a Beowulf cluster" does apply here).
How do you sign a stream?
Break the stream into blocks (it probably already has blocks), get a checksum for each block, and sign the checksum. Send them on a separate channel if you don't want to modify the original stream.
A dingo ate my sig...
These days only in name.
The article clearly states that it is the GPS position that is being tampered with. AIS is the means by which the positions are reported, it is not the system for determining positions. These ships are reporting bad positions that they are getting from their GPS systems. The ship captains seem to be aware that their GPS positions are incorrect. As I type this the ship KAREEM JUNIOR is reporting that it is sitting on land at the Gelendzhik airport ( https://www.marinetraffic.com/... ). Before it jumped onto land it's reported path zig-zagged at sea off the Russian port of Tuapse. The link I provided will show any other ships that find themselves reporting positions at the Gelendzhik airport in the future.
Incorrect, the ottoman Empire handed Crimea over in 1783, and Crimea was a separate SSR from 21 to 45, then part of the Russian SSR from 45 to 54, then a part of the Ukrainian SSR from 54 to 91, and then a part of an independent Ukraine from 91 to 2014.
So. Try to keep up!
I'm assuming you're referring to the 2002 Millennium Challenge Exercise. The popular accounts are incredibly one-sided (Malcolm Gladwell is a particular offender here) and ignore that many aspects of the war-game were unrealistic. For example, the red team leader, Van Riper, had small boats firing missiles that were physically beyond the capability of the boat to carry and having those same boats move as if they were unencumbered. While there is a lot to be learned from the reports of the exercise, it's not as bad as many people make it out to be.
Source: Conversations with a participant of MC02.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein