5 ms·

Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare

43 points by ano-ther 3y ago

kelnos 3y ago
Perhaps I just don't understand how this works all that well, but shouldn't it be easy to defeat GPS spoofing when you're 30,000+ feet in the air? Presumably the spoofed GPS signals are all coming from the ground, or close to it. I would think it would work to use a semi-directional antenna that is on top of the aircraft, pointing upward. Even an antenna that has a 180-degree field of view should reject fake GPS signals from the ground, no? Only thing I can think of that would invalidate this is if the fake GPS signals bounce off the atmosphere above the planes and come back down. What else am I missing here?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chii 3y ago
  the gps receivers are probably not going to be able to detect the direction a signal comes from.
  - mikewarot 3y ago
    You're right, a cheap GPS isn't going to do that.. however, it is well within then realm of possibility to design a GPS receiver system that uses beamforming to lock onto satellites and ignore everything else for orders of magnitude better jamming resistance.
    - minetest2048 3y ago
      Its called controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPAs), which unfortunately is an ITAR restricted thing because of insane paperwork required, so no one wants to build it for civilian receivers. Which is stupid because beamforming (or null-steering) algorithms are not that difficult to implement, and so we already have Chinese and Iranian receivers with CRPAs. So PNT National Advisory Board is trying to convince US government to stop putting CRPAs under ITAR: https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/meetings/2023-05/murphy.pdf https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/meetings/2023-05/mur...
      - mikewarot 3y ago
        I figured there was going to be some ITAR thing if I kept going with the brainstorm.... and you confirmed my hunch. There are so many things these days which are almost trivial to build and somehow fall under ITAR.
- genmud 3y ago
  Radio goes through and reflects off things, including aircraft. GPS signals are incredibly weak, and even if an aircraft attenuates or reflects 99.9% of the signal, a ground based system will nearly always be able to overpower it. It can be as simple as reflecting off the tail section of the aircraft.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Incredibly weak is correct and even bordering on understatement. They are below the noise floor by about 50dB (which is a logarithmic scale, so is a factor of 100,000x).
    - somat 3y ago
      It still blows my mind that gps even works given how far below the noise floor it is. I am very far from being any sort of expert in radio theory but my layman understanding is that the receiver "knows" exactly what a gps signal should look like and somehow magically uses that to extract the data out of the noise. It is one of those absolutely genius aspects of modern life, and we tend to just take for granted
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Same. I am pretty comfortable as a programmer and that translates to feeling moderately comfortable at gluing together blocks of digital electronics. Analog electronics are much more of a struggle and RF is entirely black magic. The idea that GPS works at all defies my understanding of what ought to be possible.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Maybe the GPS hardware (firmware) or software reached the conclusion it shouldn't finish calculating the result for some regulatory reason?
- burnerthrow008 3y ago
  > Presumably the spoofed GPS signals are all coming from the ground, or close to it. I think that's a good presumption when operating in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe less so when operating near Russia (which has its own GNSS system)? > I would think it would work to use a semi-directional antenna that is on top of the aircraft, pointing upward. Even an antenna that has a 180-degree field of view should reject fake GPS signals from the ground, no? GPS receivers already do this to reject ground reflections that could give false position readings (and the GPS signal is circularly-polarized so it can reject odd-ordered reflections off building and the ground). However, any kind of steerable (electronically or otherwise) directional GPS antenna is considered an ITAR no-no. The other problem is that GPS signals are incredibly weak (actually below the thermal noise floor), and rely on processing gain from the CDMA chipping to raise the SNR to something useful. So even an antenna with very very good rejection from the lower hemisphere will easily pass a jamming signal from the ground which is both many times closer and probably of higher power. > Only thing I can think of that would invalidate this is if the fake GPS signals bounce off the atmosphere above the planes and come back down. What else am I missing here? Any country with a space program could transmit the jamming signal from above.
jimlikeslimes 3y ago
>> President Reagan ordered an unencrypted version of GPS to be made available to the public so that civilian aircraft would have a reliable form of navigation. At the time, no one apparently foresaw any motive or incentive for tampering with GPS signals, so no provision was made to protect them. That can't be true, I believe one of the Die Hard films made at the time is based on this idea.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Selective Availability was baked in from the beginning.
RachelF 3y ago
A big reason for not updating avionics to more secure versions is price. Anything that is qualified to fly is very expensive.
m3kw9 3y ago
The evidence shows that the contrary. Has a plane ever gone down from “electronic warfare?” If a motivated adversary know you have a defence, they will find a way around it, meaning you can only go so far in defence
- thfuran 3y ago
  >The evidence shows that the contrary. Has a plane ever gone down from “electronic warfare?” Does the fact that no one has killed me yet indicate that I'm immortal?
  - MiddleEndian 3y ago
    No, but assuming most of your friends and family haven't been murdered, we may assume murder is unlikely to be the cause of your death.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      Whether or not my friends and family have been murdered shouldn't be correlated with whether or not I've been murdered. Unless we're all in the same place most of the time, I guess?
      - MiddleEndian 3y ago
        I'd say it's an indicator. For instance: You may hang out with a crowd who is inclined to engage in dangerous criminal activities. You may live in a place with high crime. You may live in a place where most people are left alone, but there are a few families with Montague/Capulet style feuds that the police have chosen to leave alone while they kill each other lol So if I have no other information, I would say someone who has a lot of family and friends who get murdered is more likely to be murdered than someone who doesn't.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      But, sticking with this analogy, several of my cousins have recently been shot while going about their day.
FourierEnvy 3y ago
For those interested in a good writeup on the subject, this explains alot of why Air Travel is vulnerable: https://medium.com/@angelinatsuboi/detecting-hacker-aircraft-using-artificial-intelligence-ec249baa866b https://medium.com/@angelinatsuboi/detecting-hacker-aircraft... Also, here's a link to the github: https://github.com/ANG13T/fly-catcher https://github.com/ANG13T/fly-catcher
p1mrx 3y ago
It would probably be a good idea for Starlink in-flight WiFi to provide position information, so pilots could use a phone/laptop as an emergency backup. Starlink is harder to jam than GPS, because the signals are strong and directional. There is precedent for using consumer tech in an emergency. After the Qantas 32 explosion, the pilots used cell phones to contact the airline because most of the plane's radios were dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS9rYWfdC9w&t=1577s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS9rYWfdC9w&t=1577s
bronco21016 3y ago
The author seems to believe that GPS is the only and primary form of navigation. Pilots in the US are trained from day one to use landmarks and dead-reckoning. From there the skills are built upon to where I believe it would be difficult to push a crew to such a gross navigational error that it causes disaster. I’ll need to read the article more closely but it appears to be a lot of fluff and leaves out the many layers of navigation still available.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  It's mostly fear mongering for Regular Joe, along with: > Another important development was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Vastly outnumbered in jets and tanks, Ukrainians quickly jury-rigged a miniature air force out of off-the-shelf drones carrying improvised munitions Lol, Ukrainians were watching videos from Syria and Afghanistan and implementing ISIS tactics for years before 2022.
  - poof131 3y ago
    I think the drone war is getting off the charts. 300,000 per month!?! [1] This will definitely have impacts in the coming decade both in war and terror/counter-terror applications. [1] https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/01/05/russia-produces-300000-fpv-drones-monthly-trains-5200-operators/ https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/01/05/russia-produces-300...
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Commercial traffic flying at 30-40 thousand feet is not flying VFR typically. And of course spotting landmarks through cloud cover or at night is not a thing. But you are right that spoofing would largely just be annoying. Commercial traffic is usually in contact with a controller and monitored on radar. So, any course deviations would result in controllers asking what they are doing and be followed by them simply vectoring them back on course with compass headings. However, GPS has replaced a lot of the NDB and VOR radios that pilots used to rely on. Also a lot of airport approaches are now GPS rather than ILS/VOR. It's pretty critical to modern aviation. GPS, or rather GNSS (which includes GPS and other systems), spoofing is a concern; but so far mainly in conflict areas. Most airlines would route around those. Resilience against spoofing is actually a big topic from a strategic point of view. Also, spoofing is a big part of counter measures against drones in e.g. Ukraine. So there is a bit of an arms race going there. The point with GNSS is that most phones can utilize multiple satellite positioning systems at the same time at this point. Which is of course something that navigation systems in planes could also do. And of course many pilots actually use ipads in the cockpit, which they could use as a backup in case of an electrical failure in the plane.
realcertify 3y ago
For the past 10 years I've been travelling to Russia occasionally. Normally during a flight I like opening up my GPS app to check the location, altitude and speed of the aicraft. About a year ago I noticed that shortly after crossing Russias border the GPS stopped working. Initially I thought it was a glitch, but after a few flights it became obvious that something was going on, probably the signal was baing jammed. Interesting that close to landing when the altitude is lower than 200m, the signal is restored. It's unclear to me how the plane is navigating though if the GPS is jammed. Very weird...
- coredog64 3y ago
  GPS isn’t the only navigation tool. INS is pretty accurate if you zero it correctly, and VOR is good enough to keep to a specific airway.
  - glitchc 3y ago
    All INSes require periodic GPS updates to limit the growth of positional error. Usually it's once per second or once every 10th of a second.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      That sounds way too frequent, isn't typical holdover like 12 hours?
- dataflow 3y ago
  This? https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/russia-jamming-us-precision-weapons-ukraine-us-general-says/392707/ https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/russia-ja... As for planes, can they do GLONASS?
  - upbeat_general 3y ago
    I would imagine any military “GPS Jammer” would also block similar systems…
grizzles 3y ago
A perfect use case for public key cryptography. Digitally sign the GPS coords!
- glitchc 3y ago
  Jamming is akin to a Denial of Service attack. It disrupts the channel. Cryptography cannot solve it.
  - quadhome 3y ago
    The article and GP’s proposal both address spoofing, not jamming.
- quadhome 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability_anti-spoofing_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability_anti-sp...
imartin2k 3y ago
I recently flew Lufthansa over that area. Here's how the inflight map looked like https://i.ibb.co/ryFdXyC/IMG-8587.jpg https://i.ibb.co/ryFdXyC/IMG-8587.jpg Fortunately I only saw this afterwards, otherwise I would have been worried. (obviously we didn't actually make this detour)

43 points by ano-ther 3y ago

Perhaps I just don't understand how this works all that well, but shouldn't it be easy to defeat GPS spoofing when you're 30,000+ feet in the air? Presumably the spoofed GPS signals are all coming from the ground, or close to it. I would think it would work to use a semi-directional antenna that is on top of the aircraft, pointing upward. Even an antenna that has a 180-degree field of view should reject fake GPS signals from the ground, no? Only thing I can think of that would invalidate this is if the fake GPS signals bounce off the atmosphere above the planes and come back down. What else am I missing here?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chii 3y ago
the gps receivers are probably not going to be able to detect the direction a signal comes from.
- mikewarot 3y ago
  You're right, a cheap GPS isn't going to do that.. however, it is well within then realm of possibility to design a GPS receiver system that uses beamforming to lock onto satellites and ignore everything else for orders of magnitude better jamming resistance.
  - minetest2048 3y ago
    Its called controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPAs), which unfortunately is an ITAR restricted thing because of insane paperwork required, so no one wants to build it for civilian receivers. Which is stupid because beamforming (or null-steering) algorithms are not that difficult to implement, and so we already have Chinese and Iranian receivers with CRPAs. So PNT National Advisory Board is trying to convince US government to stop putting CRPAs under ITAR: https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/meetings/2023-05/murphy.pdf https://www.gps.gov/governance/advisory/meetings/2023-05/mur...
    - mikewarot 3y ago
      I figured there was going to be some ITAR thing if I kept going with the brainstorm.... and you confirmed my hunch. There are so many things these days which are almost trivial to build and somehow fall under ITAR.
genmud 3y ago
Radio goes through and reflects off things, including aircraft. GPS signals are incredibly weak, and even if an aircraft attenuates or reflects 99.9% of the signal, a ground based system will nearly always be able to overpower it. It can be as simple as reflecting off the tail section of the aircraft.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Incredibly weak is correct and even bordering on understatement. They are below the noise floor by about 50dB (which is a logarithmic scale, so is a factor of 100,000x).
  - somat 3y ago
    It still blows my mind that gps even works given how far below the noise floor it is. I am very far from being any sort of expert in radio theory but my layman understanding is that the receiver "knows" exactly what a gps signal should look like and somehow magically uses that to extract the data out of the noise. It is one of those absolutely genius aspects of modern life, and we tend to just take for granted
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      Same. I am pretty comfortable as a programmer and that translates to feeling moderately comfortable at gluing together blocks of digital electronics. Analog electronics are much more of a struggle and RF is entirely black magic. The idea that GPS works at all defies my understanding of what ought to be possible.
mjevans 3y ago
Maybe the GPS hardware (firmware) or software reached the conclusion it shouldn't finish calculating the result for some regulatory reason?
burnerthrow008 3y ago
> Presumably the spoofed GPS signals are all coming from the ground, or close to it. I think that's a good presumption when operating in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe less so when operating near Russia (which has its own GNSS system)? > I would think it would work to use a semi-directional antenna that is on top of the aircraft, pointing upward. Even an antenna that has a 180-degree field of view should reject fake GPS signals from the ground, no? GPS receivers already do this to reject ground reflections that could give false position readings (and the GPS signal is circularly-polarized so it can reject odd-ordered reflections off building and the ground). However, any kind of steerable (electronically or otherwise) directional GPS antenna is considered an ITAR no-no. The other problem is that GPS signals are incredibly weak (actually below the thermal noise floor), and rely on processing gain from the CDMA chipping to raise the SNR to something useful. So even an antenna with very very good rejection from the lower hemisphere will easily pass a jamming signal from the ground which is both many times closer and probably of higher power. > Only thing I can think of that would invalidate this is if the fake GPS signals bounce off the atmosphere above the planes and come back down. What else am I missing here? Any country with a space program could transmit the jamming signal from above.

jimlikeslimes 3y ago

>> President Reagan ordered an unencrypted version of GPS to be made available to the public so that civilian aircraft would have a reliable form of navigation. At the time, no one apparently foresaw any motive or incentive for tampering with GPS signals, so no provision was made to protect them. That can't be true, I believe one of the Die Hard films made at the time is based on this idea.

thfuran 3y ago
Selective Availability was baked in from the beginning.

RachelF 3y ago

A big reason for not updating avionics to more secure versions is price. Anything that is qualified to fly is very expensive.

m3kw9 3y ago

The evidence shows that the contrary. Has a plane ever gone down from “electronic warfare?” If a motivated adversary know you have a defence, they will find a way around it, meaning you can only go so far in defence

thfuran 3y ago
>The evidence shows that the contrary. Has a plane ever gone down from “electronic warfare?” Does the fact that no one has killed me yet indicate that I'm immortal?
- MiddleEndian 3y ago
  No, but assuming most of your friends and family haven't been murdered, we may assume murder is unlikely to be the cause of your death.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Whether or not my friends and family have been murdered shouldn't be correlated with whether or not I've been murdered. Unless we're all in the same place most of the time, I guess?
    - MiddleEndian 3y ago
      I'd say it's an indicator. For instance: You may hang out with a crowd who is inclined to engage in dangerous criminal activities. You may live in a place with high crime. You may live in a place where most people are left alone, but there are a few families with Montague/Capulet style feuds that the police have chosen to leave alone while they kill each other lol So if I have no other information, I would say someone who has a lot of family and friends who get murdered is more likely to be murdered than someone who doesn't.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    But, sticking with this analogy, several of my cousins have recently been shot while going about their day.

FourierEnvy 3y ago

For those interested in a good writeup on the subject, this explains alot of why Air Travel is vulnerable: https://medium.com/@angelinatsuboi/detecting-hacker-aircraft-using-artificial-intelligence-ec249baa866b https://medium.com/@angelinatsuboi/detecting-hacker-aircraft... Also, here's a link to the github: https://github.com/ANG13T/fly-catcher https://github.com/ANG13T/fly-catcher

p1mrx 3y ago

It would probably be a good idea for Starlink in-flight WiFi to provide position information, so pilots could use a phone/laptop as an emergency backup. Starlink is harder to jam than GPS, because the signals are strong and directional. There is precedent for using consumer tech in an emergency. After the Qantas 32 explosion, the pilots used cell phones to contact the airline because most of the plane's radios were dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS9rYWfdC9w&t=1577s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS9rYWfdC9w&t=1577s

bronco21016 3y ago

The author seems to believe that GPS is the only and primary form of navigation. Pilots in the US are trained from day one to use landmarks and dead-reckoning. From there the skills are built upon to where I believe it would be difficult to push a crew to such a gross navigational error that it causes disaster. I’ll need to read the article more closely but it appears to be a lot of fluff and leaves out the many layers of navigation still available.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
It's mostly fear mongering for Regular Joe, along with: > Another important development was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Vastly outnumbered in jets and tanks, Ukrainians quickly jury-rigged a miniature air force out of off-the-shelf drones carrying improvised munitions Lol, Ukrainians were watching videos from Syria and Afghanistan and implementing ISIS tactics for years before 2022.
- poof131 3y ago
  I think the drone war is getting off the charts. 300,000 per month!?! [1] This will definitely have impacts in the coming decade both in war and terror/counter-terror applications. [1] https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/01/05/russia-produces-300000-fpv-drones-monthly-trains-5200-operators/ https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/01/05/russia-produces-300...
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Commercial traffic flying at 30-40 thousand feet is not flying VFR typically. And of course spotting landmarks through cloud cover or at night is not a thing. But you are right that spoofing would largely just be annoying. Commercial traffic is usually in contact with a controller and monitored on radar. So, any course deviations would result in controllers asking what they are doing and be followed by them simply vectoring them back on course with compass headings. However, GPS has replaced a lot of the NDB and VOR radios that pilots used to rely on. Also a lot of airport approaches are now GPS rather than ILS/VOR. It's pretty critical to modern aviation. GPS, or rather GNSS (which includes GPS and other systems), spoofing is a concern; but so far mainly in conflict areas. Most airlines would route around those. Resilience against spoofing is actually a big topic from a strategic point of view. Also, spoofing is a big part of counter measures against drones in e.g. Ukraine. So there is a bit of an arms race going there. The point with GNSS is that most phones can utilize multiple satellite positioning systems at the same time at this point. Which is of course something that navigation systems in planes could also do. And of course many pilots actually use ipads in the cockpit, which they could use as a backup in case of an electrical failure in the plane.

realcertify 3y ago

For the past 10 years I've been travelling to Russia occasionally. Normally during a flight I like opening up my GPS app to check the location, altitude and speed of the aicraft. About a year ago I noticed that shortly after crossing Russias border the GPS stopped working. Initially I thought it was a glitch, but after a few flights it became obvious that something was going on, probably the signal was baing jammed. Interesting that close to landing when the altitude is lower than 200m, the signal is restored. It's unclear to me how the plane is navigating though if the GPS is jammed. Very weird...

coredog64 3y ago
GPS isn’t the only navigation tool. INS is pretty accurate if you zero it correctly, and VOR is good enough to keep to a specific airway.
- glitchc 3y ago
  All INSes require periodic GPS updates to limit the growth of positional error. Usually it's once per second or once every 10th of a second.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    That sounds way too frequent, isn't typical holdover like 12 hours?
dataflow 3y ago
This? https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/russia-jamming-us-precision-weapons-ukraine-us-general-says/392707/ https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/russia-ja... As for planes, can they do GLONASS?
- upbeat_general 3y ago
  I would imagine any military “GPS Jammer” would also block similar systems…

grizzles 3y ago

A perfect use case for public key cryptography. Digitally sign the GPS coords!

glitchc 3y ago
Jamming is akin to a Denial of Service attack. It disrupts the channel. Cryptography cannot solve it.
- quadhome 3y ago
  The article and GP’s proposal both address spoofing, not jamming.
quadhome 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability_anti-spoofing_module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_availability_anti-sp...

imartin2k 3y ago

I recently flew Lufthansa over that area. Here's how the inflight map looked like https://i.ibb.co/ryFdXyC/IMG-8587.jpg https://i.ibb.co/ryFdXyC/IMG-8587.jpg Fortunately I only saw this afterwards, otherwise I would have been worried. (obviously we didn't actually make this detour)