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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's all fun and games until a ship runs aground or collides with something, and an eye gets poked out
The US military already encrypts GPS for themselves - it can still be jammed, but it can't be spoofed.
Maybe it's time encryption was applied to civilian GPS as well. It's not like consumer electronics don't have the capability to handle the decryption, and it's not like you'd have to use the same keys as military GPS.
These attacks have been known for a while, and are not hard at all. All you need is a radio that is stronger than the GPS signal. It's been demonstrated multiple times at DEFCON, and there are youtube videos that show you how to do it with a hackrf radio (for example, if you want to move to a particular place while playing Pokemon Go).
Wikipedia suggests that Russia spoofs GPS whenever Putin is in the area.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Are we spoofing GPS here, or are we spoofing AIS? Just so we're clear... GPS is obviously GPS, but the summary seems to conflate GPS and AIS. AIS is a terrestrial based VHF system which takes GPS data from individual ships adds identifiers and transmits it to anyone who cares to listen, which usually means other ships and shore-side receivers. It sounds to me like it is AIS that is being spoofed -- which would be trivial compared to GPS.
Keep in mind that AIS is just one of several redundant systems which ships use to navigate waterways and track positions of nearby vessels.
No investigation has indicated suspicions that Russia did anything. The only one who suspects Russia is one captain of a tanker ship.
Beware of the Leopard.