In 2023, at least 20 civilian aircraft flying via the Center East have been misled by their onboard GPS models into flying close to Iranian airspace with out clearance—conditions that would have provoked a world incident. These planes have been victims of GPS spoofing, by which misleading alerts from the bottom, disguised as reliable alerts from GPS satellites in orbit, trick an plane’s devices into reporting the plane’s location as someplace that it isn’t. Spoofing is a extra refined tactic than GPS jamming, by which malicious alerts overwhelm a focused GPS receiver till it could now not operate.
Long theorized, GPS spoofing assaults have more and more cropped up in civilian airspace in recent times, prompting considerations about this new frontier in digital warfare. IEEE Spectrumspoke with Todd Humphreys of the College of Texas at Austin about how spoofing works and the way plane could be protected against it.
What’s an instance of a GPS spoofing assault?
Todd Humphreys: In 2017, we started to see spoofing assaults taking place within the Black Sea. As time progressed, the spoofing has solely gotten extra refined and extra widespread. These days, in the event you’re within the Japanese Mediterranean, and also you’re on a flight certain for Turkey or Cyprus or Israel, it’s very likely that the GPS models in your plane will get spoofed. They’ll point out a place on the Beirut airport or in Cairo. And it’s as a result of Israel is sending out alerts that idiot GPS receivers for a whole lot of kilometers across the nation.
How can spoofing be detected?
Humphreys: It’s provable that you simply can not, in all instances, detect spoofing. That’s as a result of GPS is a one-way system. It broadcasts alerts, however it doesn’t take any enter from the receivers. So there’s at all times the potential for any person broadcasting a lookalike sign and fooling a receiver.
How can airways cut back the probabilities of their planes’ GPS models being spoofed?
Humphreys: There’s an antenna on the entrance of enormous industrial plane, and within the aft additionally, there’s an antenna. Combining these collectively and analyzing the alerts from them would allow you to detect virtually all instances of spoofing.
So what’s the catch?
Humphreys: I spoke with Boeing about this a few years in the past. I stated, “Look, I’d prefer to give you a approach of mixing the alerts from these two completely different antennas in order that you would extra readily detect spoofing.” And so they identified that it was essential for his or her programs that these antennas function totally independently as a result of they’re there for redundancy. They’re there for security causes.
Will the combat in opposition to spoofing at all times be an arms race?
Humphreys: There’s typically a trade-off between conventional security on the one hand—and however, purposeful assaults from strategic adversaries. So it actually will depend on what you’re attempting to guard your self from. Is it that perhaps certainly one of your inside GPS antennas is simply going to spontaneously fail, which does occur? Or is it that your most urgent concern is being caught within the crossfire of a struggle zone and having your GPS receiver spoofed with out understanding? Sadly, it’s robust to handle each of those issues with the identical {hardware} on the identical time.
This text seems within the January 2025 problem as “5 Questions for Todd Humphreys.”
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