9 ms·

Planes are having their GPS hacked. Could new clocks keep them safe?

• anovikov 2y ago
  So this pertains to jamming so strong that traditional jam-proof GPS that uses signal phase shift to weed out GPS signals coming from "wrong" directions, are insufficient? 100db attenuation of jamming signal has been achieved around 15 years ago with those. In the air, there are always more GPS satellites visible than necessary. So jam-proofing through signal processing methods is the way to go.
  • DevelopingElk 2y ago
    It can be done, but airplane GPS receivers aren't jamming resistant. This is expected to change in the next decades.
• thesh4d0w 2y ago
  I don't understand this article. If the GPS signals are jammed, what purpose does it serve to have an atomic clock on board your plane? You still need accurate signals with time data to measure against. Am I missing something?
  • BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    I didn't read the article, but: a GPS receiver must calculate/find both it's time and position to get a fix. So maybe by having the time already available really accurately it makes the job of finding position easier?
    • gorbypark 2y ago
      From my (very basic) understanding of GPS you need at minimum four satellites to calculate the time. If you had a local atomic clock in sync with the GPS satellites, you'd only need three satellites to get a position fix. It would (probably, maybe?) also speed up the time to first fix / time to a precise position fix.
  • simne 2y ago
    As I read from book about gyroscopes, most sensitive achieve so fine accuracy, they detect daily Earth rotation and even yearly Earth rotation. But when they speaking about near zero temperatures, looks like they talking about something like Rydberg atoms - extremely sensitive matter, which could be considered as nuclear scale gyroscopes, or quantum gyroscopes, or read more about quantum accelerometer. And current inertial navigation could be used to calculate relative coordinates like automobile odometer, but from integrating accelerations. But classic accelerometer is just not fine enough, and at this place appear quantum accelerometer and quantum gyroscope. And I agree, article is terrible. I don't know why they use so abstract language, when could just say, navy already tested quantum navigation.
    • simne 2y ago
      To be more concrete, space rockets nearly all fly with inertial navigation, but they are extreme case, because most use only inertial navigation just few minutes (so all those classic gyros/accelerometers integrated errors are small enough to successful enter stable orbit, and then using some sort of radio or optical fine measurements and making corrections with fine engines). Planes flights are much more lengthy than rockets - I think, typical ~40 minutes or more (most long I hear 20 hours), so INS could integrate huge mistake.
      • p_l 2y ago
        INS essentially was expensive and AFAIK once GPS became available started to drop off in use outside of military. And with GPS availability coinciding with switching to more modern integrated Flight Management System/Computer, a lot of planes simply don't have INS installed.
        • scrlk 2y ago
          > a lot of planes simply don't have INS installed Perhaps in general aviation, but I can't think of any modern commercial airliner without an INS via the air data inertial reference unit.
  • touisteur 2y ago
    You can get a very accurate timestamp from GNSS. What lots of people do then is slave a PLL based on a local oscillator, to be able to get time between two GNSS captations. Or to be able to extrapolate when they have no GNSS signal. Now suppose someone is spoofing your GNSS signals, it's pretty hard to replace a constellation with another one whilst maintaining time consistency for you. One way to detect spoofing is comparing what a local clock is saying to whatever the GNSS is giving. A local, unfudgeable, stable, accurate clock is a good reference for this.
    • thesh4d0w 2y ago
      Ahhhhh, that makes sense. Treating this as security mechanism rather than an anti-jamming one.
    • DannyBee 2y ago
      The article is seriously confused. What you are talking about is easy - chip scale atomic clocks are easy to get. I can have one shipped to me today. Hell, i have one on a time card in my basement. Assume you want it even super accurate. Great, 3k for an SA65 https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/components/atomic-clocks/embedded-atomic-oscillators/csac https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/clock-and-timing/co... Holdover would be fine for even a very long flight. Hell, even a good rubidium oscillator doing 1PPS will stay within 200 nanoseconds over 12 hours. If you are trying to do navigation while jammed, none of these help you. You still need good reckoning, which is the hard part We done solved the clock problem enough already :)
      • touisteur 2y ago
        I was under the impression (and from experience too) that the very stable oscillators were finicky and sensitive to temperature swings and in general costly to use properly in "hard" environments. I'm happy to learn this is not the case for every good oscillator. TIL.
• harha_ 2y ago
  Russia is like a kid playing with matches. I'm a noob when it comes to aviation, but AFAIK RNAV GPS approaches are quite common? Disrupting that is dangerous.
  • yetihehe 2y ago
    No, they are bullies trying to extort other kids. They fully know what they are doing, but they are trying to find what they can get away with.
  • piokoch 2y ago
    Russia is playing with matches since NATO allows for this. It would be sufficient if in Kaliningrad Oblast or in Petersburg NATO forces jammed GPS/Glonas/Beidou and, as a bonus, also VAR system (much more important than GPS for aviation) and next day Russia would apologize and never try stupid games again.
    • harha_ 2y ago
      Pardon my ignorance, but do you mean VOR instead of VAR? Or what does VAR stand for in your example?
  • p_l 2y ago
    RNAV are less common than people think, and given the limitations appear to mostly be used as secondary help in conditions where one could possibly go by vectoring. Losing them however does drop capacity because now you need extra work to get planes to final.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Russia keep seeing what they can get away with and then push harder. Since nobody is willing to apply enough meaningful punishment due to fear of escalation, and they successfully propagandized/bought the US Republican party, they're winning on this axis. More sanctions should have been imposed when they shot down a passenger plane and killed several hundred Dutch civilians.
    • 2y ago
• KaiserPro 2y ago
  GPS and other navigation systems are well worth the time to look into. something like Decca or LORAN are really simple to understand: two or more base stations in a known location emitting phase locked signals. By counting the nodes/antinodes of the harmonics, you can work out how far away you are from the base stations. The downside is that you need a initial fix to work out absolute location. The thing thats kinda touched on here is that GPS uses clocks to allow the receiver to work out how long the signal has been in flight (simplification) If you know where the satellites are (using the Almanac of satellite positions) you can get your location by fairly simple triangulation. Now, you don't have an atomic clock on your receiver, so how can you accurately measure the time difference between signals? for GPS you only need to know the relative time difference between each satellite, and even thought quartz clocks are only accurate to seconds a year, in the ~20-50ms it takes for the signal to arrive, its more than accurate enough. However that means you are open to spoofing, because you sync your local clock to a satellite, you have no real way of detecting if the clock has skipped. If you have an accurate clock source, you can then validate the clocks that are on the transmitters. I think, but can't confidently assert that calculating position becomes easier because you have an authoritative clock source, so don't need to piss about with clock sync using an unknown time offset. I think the implication is that this provides a strong form of signal authentication. However chipscale super-stable clock references also allow more autonomous styles of navigation. (ie celestial)
• looofooo0 2y ago
  Fun fact: optical mouse tech was developed for airplane navigation first. So it would not be very expensive to have this system as a backup.
  • Eduard 2y ago
    > optical mouse tech was developed for airplane navigation first Citation needed.
    • looofooo0 2y ago
      I don't think there is any direct claim for this. But you will find lots of old research about optical flow measurement for navigation. Optical flow sensor part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow seems like a good start.
      • appointment 2y ago
        Satellite guided approaches are used when there is no visibility, so I don't know how that would help. You could use terrain-matching radar for navigation, but that would require additional equipment on the airplane. Every plane already has GNSS receivers, so implementing RNAV is basically a software feature.
• bArray 2y ago
  https://archive.md/DvdcV https://archive.md/DvdcV I cannot tell you how infuriating it is as a UK tax payer on a UK-based ISP, that pays for this content to be made, to be blocked from viewing it. Worse still, if I view the article in 'Private' browser mode then I can see it all.
• PinguTS 2y ago
  What I don't understand about this GPS spamming: we don't need to rely on GPS. We have Galileo, (GLONASS) and BAIDU. That is the reason we its now called GNSS. Most of the chips and as such the receivers are supoorting all of these systems in parallel. While I understand that the Chinese use their own coordinate system, I don't if BAIDU is based on that or not. Galileo is available. Galileo is able to use authenticated signals. Galileo has much improved over GPS. I assume in (important) comercial applications like aircrafts, you could use the better Galileo service for which you have to pay for. So how important is GPS spaming really?
  • jstanley 2y ago
    Do you mean it is specifically GPS that is getting spammed, or more generally are all of the GNSS systems getting spammed?
    • bArray 2y ago
      In the UK "GPS" is used as a general term for GNSS. I don't doubt that the aircraft already use multiple satellites.
  • ElectRabbit 2y ago
    > Galileo Which has optional cryptographic signatures of its positioning data. It's not spoofable anymore (but still jam'able with strong transmitters). Free for use. (https://www.gsc-europa.eu/sites/default/files/sites/all/files/Galileo_OSNMA_SIS_ICD_v1.0.pdf https://www.gsc-europa.eu/sites/default/files/sites/all/file...) Same for the HAS (High Accuracy Service) which offers precision down to 30cm without additional correction data. Also free for use. But requires a special receiver as it's using an additional band. Galileo was the ugly duckling for a very long time - but it turned into a shining one after it aged a bit.
    • PinguTS 2y ago
      > Galileo was the ugly duckling for a very long time - but it turned into a shining one after it aged a bit. Yeah, for some time I was also in the camp of "why we need our own expansive service". But the current development has shown, that it was a wise desicion to have our own system. BTW: thanks for updating on some other details. I never followed up really, it was from the initial plans, that I was told there should be comercial service, that should pay. Also that for some emergency services there is a very limited possibility to have a back channel.
• ElectRabbit 2y ago
  Galileo offers optional cryptographic signatures for their positioning data. It's a solved problem and free for use. https://www.gsc-europa.eu/sites/default/files/sites/all/files/Galileo_OSNMA_SIS_ICD_v1.0.pdf https://www.gsc-europa.eu/sites/default/files/sites/all/file...
  • michaelt 2y ago
    Sadly this doesn’t solve the problem. Spoofers simply receive the signed signal and re-broadcast it with a tiny delay. Signatures still intact.
    • brohee 2y ago
      If you ever received unspoofed data, and have a somewhat accurate local clock (rubidium is fairly cheap), you can detect the spoofing.
• bArray 2y ago
  > The Boeing 737 MAX 8-200 had already descended to around 850ft (259m) when the disruption occurred. Instead of landing, the plane was forced to climb back into the sky and divert nearly 400km (250 miles) south to Warsaw, Poland. Lithuanian air authorities later confirmed the aircraft had been affected by "GPS signal interference". GPS is incredibly flimsy. Normally it operates by taking the average of 1000 observations to generate a noisy signal. It's not that difficult to be louder than something shouting from space. You can pick up cheap GPS blockers easily about the size of a walkie-talkie (handheld radio). > By carrying a group of atoms cooled to -273C on the plane itself, rather than relying on an external signal, the technology can't be interfered with by jamming. Last year I was on a plane where if the engines were not running, it entirely went into darkness. They hooked the plane up to the airport and tripped the airport electrics too. Now imagine if your plane loses power momentarily, and suddenly your GPS stops working entirely. > Henry White, part of the team from BAE Systems that worked on the test flight, told BBC News that he thought the first application could be aboard ships, "where there's a bit more space". > Quantum clocks, gyroscopes and accelerometers are large, bulky and incredibly expensive, with an accurate quantum clock costing around £100,000. Yet military research is allowing the creation of smaller, better and cheaper systems. Likely a minimum of 10 years from being viable. Mt White of BAE is politely saying as much.
  • freddie_mercury 2y ago
    > Now imagine if your plane loses power momentarily, and suddenly your GPS stops working entirely. Now imagine your plane loses power momentarily and switches to a backup system... The exact same GPS every plane is using today.
    • SkyPuncher 2y ago
      Even further, you can loose your super accurate special crystal and simply fall back to “normal” GPS.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    I don't really understand why the plane was diverted because GPS was jammed; I get that it's important for navigation, but not how it's required for landing when they're that close. There's (iirc) close range guidance systems, and of course visual ones (lamps, stripes, etc).
• InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  But do planes not have these fancy laser gyroscopes- so accurate, they have to correct in software for earth and the solar system moving? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_laser_gyroscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_laser_gyroscope Why is GPS relevant here?
• h1fra 2y ago
  It's bad when Russia is doing it, but no mention of Israel jamming a big part of the land during the war
  • jjwiseman 2y ago
    For one thing, the scale of Russia's interference is probably close to 100x as many aircraft being affected. Maybe 1000x or more if you consider the total number of aircraft affected over the past 3 years.
• Iolaum 2y ago
  Before the GPS era (military) planes had inertial navigation systems, why can't civilian planes have something like that as a backup until you get in range of a terrestrial navigation radio tower - those are still in use, right?
  • secondcoming 2y ago
    They still have this system. This video gives great insights into how GPS jamming affects planes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm9B-oofY9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm9B-oofY9g
  • izacus 2y ago
    INS is still the primary navigation system on most airliners with GPS providing correction data for drifting.
  • kayodelycaon 2y ago
    Commercial airliners have this for a long time. Early 474 models have it. And VOR (VHF Omnidirectional Range) beacons are still used. Many of the systems used are much older than people realize. Airports had ILS (instrument landing systems) in the 1950s. Improved low visibility versions started coming out in the 1970s.
    • jillesvangurp 2y ago
      A lot of these systems are being phased out. Lots of airports now have GPS only approaches where they would have had an ILS systems in the past. The bigger airports still have more advanced ILS systems for landings in extremely limited/no visibility but also have GPS approaches. A normal IFR approach has more relaxed minimums that you can get to with GPS so there are a lot of airports without any ILS system in place at this point. The GPS approach gets you down to minimums of something like 200 feet above ground at which you either have the runway in sight or abort the landing. Likewise, VOR radios are slowly being retired and increasingly used as a fallback only. GPS systems in planes have been common for since end of last century. ILS and VOR infrastructure is kind of expensive to keep up and running and increasingly optional.
• distantsounds 2y ago
  I love it when James Bond plots come to life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Dies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Dies
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• lenerdenator 2y ago
  The behavior will continue until a negative stimulus is introduced. Which seems to be hard seeing as how the Russian government is good at convincing people (mainly their own, Europe's elite, and members of the Republican Party in the US) that it's okay to do what they do.
• _heimdall 2y ago
  When Israel was waiting for a retaliatory strike from Iran they jammed GPS in the region. I never found a clear explanation of how it was done technically, this would make total sense if their system also was targeting atomic clock signals rather than GPS itself to confuse incoming missiles or aircraft. That does raise an interesting question though - do missles actually depend on the standard atomic clock signals? Maybe that isn't how they did it, that seems like a dependency you wouldn't want in a weapon.
  • fsh 2y ago
    GPS signals are atomic clock signals. The receiver triangulates its position by comparing the time delays between the signals originating from different satellites. The receiver itself doesn't require a good clock since it only compares signals with each other.
    • grotorea 2y ago
      And you can even update your clock info from the GPS signal. So the only dependency is GPS or similar. But would Iranian missiles even use GPS? Isn't accuracy limited for civilian use for precisely this reason?
      • avianlyric 2y ago
        No. The US stopped degrading civilian GPS accuracy in 2001[1]. Although the US retains the ability to degrade civilian GPS in specific target areas. Regardless, if you’re building a long range missile, you need some ability for it to navigate. If you’re not using GPS, then what would you use instead? Additionally there’s nothing preventing you from using multiple navigation systems in tandem and fusing the results together, which is almost certainly what these missile do. Sensor fusion reduces the impact of stuff like GPS jamming, but certainly doesn’t eliminate it. The over all system will be less accurate with fewer inputs, and if you’re the one faced with a high speed missile flying at you, I suspect you’ll take every edge you can get, regardless of how small the impact might be. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_Positioning_System#Selective_Availability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Globa...
• thwra 2y ago
  The title is clickbait. It implies hacking the plane's hardware, which is not occurring. GPS jamming is unfortunate, but relying on U.S. GPS is foolish anyway (as the article also points out). Planes still have inertial navigation systems. It worked before GPS, why not now? GPS for tracking phone users should go away anyway. If you are in an unknown city, but a damn paper map. No tracking and you absorb the big picture much faster.
  • yimby2001 2y ago
    GPS isn’t there to track you. It’s a tool for you to use to know where you are.
  • rlpb 2y ago
    > GPS for tracking phone users should go away anyway. If you are in an unknown city, but a damn paper map. No tracking and you absorb the big picture much faster. Regular GPS is receive-only. GPS receivers naturally cannot be tracked. Tracking happens much higher up the stack, such as with your map app downloading local map tiles for display. Technology-wise, it's trivial to have a smartphone based map that is tracking-free, and the privacy focused alternate phone OSes do this already.
• userbinator 2y ago
  Planes have been flying for decades before GPS even existed, yet the article seems to make it sound like they wouldn't be able to without GPS. Unfortunately no mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system at all.
  • bitwize 2y ago
    INS accumulates error though. It comes in handy in the absence of any other navigation system, but generally an INS is supplemented by some sort of radio navigation aid such as VOR, LORAN, or GPS to correct it. Except guess what! Many of the VOR stations in the USA have been shut down, due to the high availability of GPS!
  • avianlyric 2y ago
    After the invention of GPS, aviation increased its capabilities due to the advantages GPS provides. Many modern flights depend on those capabilities to be economically viable, and are thus dependent on GPS. Simply because it’s possible to fly without GPS doesn’t mean it’s commercially viable. Remember, before GPS, direct transatlantic flight weren’t generally possible because there’s no radar or radio coverage out there to help with flight navigation. Also for a long time, plane navigated by flying low and literally following giant arrows on the ground[1]. I doubt anyone is particularly keen to return to that kind of navigation. [1] https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/ https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/
    • marsovo 2y ago
      Not to mention removal of the alternatives in favor of GPS, e.g. shutting down VOR beacons (see e.g. https://www.flightaware.com/squawks/view/1/24_hours/popular/56667/FAA_Releases_VOR_Decommissioning_Policy https://www.flightaware.com/squawks/view/1/24_hours/popular/...)
    • taeric 2y ago
      It is interesting to consider how many old mysteries in flying came down to "pilot didn't know where they actually were." This isn't much different from hikers getting stranded, even when they are within a mile of a marked trail.
• cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
  As a particularly egregiously fragile aircraft, the Embraer Phenom 300 isn't certified to fly into areas without functioning GPS because it affects flight stability. QNS can't happen soon enough and hopefully the consumerization and miniaturization of strontium optical lattice clocks too.
• teleforce 2y ago
  I think we need to separate issues here namely the threat types, one is jamming and another is spoofing. As of jamming most probably the new clock will not help. But for spoofing it probably can be prevented and mitigated with the new clock, but the root cause is the pseudo-orthogonality of the spread spectrum. To put it simply, in housing property market the main criteria are three namely location, location, location. Similarly in communication and specifically in wireless the main criteria are also three namely orthogonality, orthogonality, orthogonality. It's interesting to note that all mainstream GNSS systems including GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou are using spread spectrum modulation system, and they all affected by the pseudo-orthogonality of the spread spectrum system. There's a reason why the newer 4G/5G, and even Wi-Fi have moved away from spread spectrum modulation that's was being initially used by 3G and 802.11b, respectively, by fully embracing OFDM. The reverse-engineered Starlink modulation is reportedly using OFDM as well [1]. This mainly because of spread spectrum limitations but at the time it's not due to spoofing (security) but due to bandwidth scaling (performance) limitations. For GNSS on the other hand, don't care about the bandwidth because it's for location service not streaming video, but the limitations of being pseudo-orthogonal eventually got to them in the form of spoofing vulnerability. The next generation GNSS designers perhaps need to bite the bullet, and should employ proper orthogonal modulation (OFDM or others), not pseudo one like spread spectrum. Having highly accurate on board clock is a hacked solution at best, not a proper solution, and it just unnecessarily increase the upfront cost and maintenance complexity by being overkill and over engineered. [1] Reverse Engineered Signal Structure of the Starlink Ku-Band Downlink (2022) [PDF]: https://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/starlink_structure.pdf https://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/starlin...
  • ooterness 2y ago
    This is entirely wrong. OFDM is necessary for WiFi etc. in order to maximize spectral efficiency (i.e., bps per Hz for a given unit of radio spectrum) and mitigate multipath. The main purpose of the GPS spreading codes is to prevent self-interference from the other satellites and to increase the effective bandwidth for the cross ambiguity function (i.e., to get a nice, sharp cross-correlation peak in the time-domain). The pre-spreading data signal is only ~50 bits per second, so spectral efficiency is not a primary concern.
• throw0101c 2y ago
  Another thing that is being looked at are antennas (CRPA: Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas) which filter signals more, so that "GPS signals" that come from the ground and the sides are more likely to be rejected: * https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/26/faa-moving-toward-crpa-on-aircraft-rfi-for-study-released-by-nawc/ https://rntfnd.org/2025/02/26/faa-moving-toward-crpa-on-airc... One tripping point is that in the US, CRPAs are on ITAR, so exports are difficult: * https://www.gpsworld.com/first-fix-freeing-crpas/ https://www.gpsworld.com/first-fix-freeing-crpas/ Given that GPS/GNSS comes from satellites, ignoring signals from not-from-the-sky seems like a quick win.
  • burnerthrow008 2y ago
    > Given that GPS/GNSS comes from satellites, ignoring signals from not-from-the-sky seems like a quick win. You're right, but GPS antennas already have some rejection from the "bottom" hemisphere. So they're already rejecting not-sky. CRPAs (of the type contemplated by ITAR) are electronically steerable antennas (phased arrays), that allow you to steer one or more nulls to the direction of the noise source(s). That gives much better rejection of point-source noise.
  • jpm_sd 2y ago
    They're taking CRPAs off the ITAR list later this year, supposedly. https://insidegnss.com/crpas-to-be-removed-from-itar-list-opening-market-for-u-s-manufacturers/ https://insidegnss.com/crpas-to-be-removed-from-itar-list-op...
  • KennyBlanken 2y ago
    GPS signals from low attitudes improve accuracy (to a point) because they provide much better triangulation. You want low attitude GPS satellites. You also don't want to lose signal every time the receiver tips, like when going up/down slight hills.
    • Aloisius 2y ago
      They don't lose signal when the receiver tips (which would make it useless for planes). They use antenna arrays to filter signals coming from directions they don't expect, too strong, etc. These systems have been used used in military aircraft for a long time.
• kevin42 2y ago
  I have an amateur built experimental airplane, and on my first flight, GPS wasn't working. It was working on the ground, so I figured a bad coax cable or something from the vibration. When I landed it started working again, but later in the day it wasn't. A few days later I found out that the nearby Air Force base was testing GPS jamming, and there was even a NOTAM about it. There's a site that tracks GPS jamming: https://gpsjam.org/ https://gpsjam.org/
  • ge96 2y ago
    What is that area to the right of India?
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • inejge 2y ago
      Myanmar, alias Burma. They're having a hot civil war since 2021. (They've had tensions and insurgencies for as long as they've been an independent state.)
    • pixl97 2y ago
      Myanmar, which is currently a conflict zone.
    • ajross 2y ago
      Myanmar. Unstable autocracy, recent coup, ongoing uprising. A huge mess, and exactly where you'd expect the ruling party to be trying to eliminate navigation aids.
    • GJim 2y ago
      > to the right *East
  • alphan0n 2y ago
    I’ve never seen a map that has each locality in its primary language..
• mvip 2y ago
  Shameless self-plug: I had Ken Munro from PTP on my podcast [1] in the episode 'Hacking airplanes, ships and IoT devices with Ken Munro' where we dove into GPS hacking and spoofing at length. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkhCN7taMK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkhCN7taMK4
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• lawlessone 2y ago
  There is solution to this called the ARM (Anti Radiation Missile)
• csense 2y ago
  If you can't receive signals from the GPS satellites because some country's military is jamming them, how does having an accurate on-board clock help? Are they somehow able to determine position via dead reckoning? How does that account for errors from wind, vibration, etc. and compounding of errors over time? (I'm pretty sure dead reckoning is not a closed-loop system) "Miniaturize a very accurate clock" seems like a fairly straightforward engineering challenge. "I can give you clocks as precise as you need, now design me a system that can give your coordinates in thick fog without GPS or any other external radio signals" seems like a much harder one.
  • brohee 2y ago
    It's not white noise jamming it's replaying with a delay, so the receiver is getting a meaningful signal.
    • Salgat 2y ago
      Technically both techniques can be used for gps hacking. It also seems you can fake a gps signal altogether, because the public signal is not cryptographically signed, which surprises me (the only thing that makes sense to me is that the gps protocol doesn't have room for adding a signature, so it'd be a breaking change to the protocol).
  • cpncrunch 2y ago
    Indeed. The article is a bit confusing on details. At the end it talks about accelerometers and gyros, but aircraft have been using laser ring gyros for decades. They now use gps because it is much more accurate.
  • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
    Historically ships at sea could determine latitude through sun-sighting or stars, but longitude was impossible because they did not have a clock which was accurate enough I doubt they're navigating using the sun an stars, but if the airspeed indicator is accurate, and you know you're heading, all you need is an accurate clock to determine absolute position since the last known good position.
• brohee 2y ago
  Galileo can use TESLA (no relation), see RFC 4082, to mostly protect from the issue. Getting away from GPS is actually the simplest way. An explanation of how it works here: https://www.euspa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/expo/osnma_public_testing_javier_simon_v3.pdf https://www.euspa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/expo/osnma_p...
  • Salgat 2y ago
    Mind you this only helps to tell you if the signal is authentic, you're still without that navigation system at that point, hence the search for a localized alternative.
    • hylaride 2y ago
      Also, the Russians have been playing around with rebroadcasting legit signals with slight delays as well. The Ukraine war has been a very interesting time to observe these tricks.
      • brohee 2y ago
        If you have a good local clock (e.g. rubidium), you can now detect the signal is from the past and correctly conclude you are jammed and trust INS, starnav or whatever instead...
      • cyberax 2y ago
        TESLA encryption is resistant against rebroadcasting. The idea is to use a PKI infrastructure to digitally sign the timestamp stream at fairly granular intervals. This way, you'll be able to find a set of satellites that are not getting jammed. Another option is to use the low-orbit satellites in addition to regular sats.
        • hylaride 2y ago
          This is true, but the Russians have demonstrated that combining this with jamming they can make this still possible (along with other tricks). Obviously there's going to be some back and forth movement via countermeasures and updates, but the west has only very recently woken up to these threats.
• metalman 2y ago
  be interesting to see, what just caused two large ships to collide off the English coast, in a known and busy area ships on fire, more than 30 rescued so far
• biker142541 2y ago
  Hacked doesn't seem like the right term. It's jamming, being overwhelmed, not infiltrated in any way. Curious if others use this term in such a way?
  • jotux 2y ago
    The term used in industry is typically "spoofing." https://www.u-blox.com/en/blogs/tech/gnss-spoofing-new-security-level https://www.u-blox.com/en/blogs/tech/gnss-spoofing-new-secur...
    • vlovich123 2y ago
      Spoofing is different from jamming. Spoofing is when you trick the receiver into thinking the position is one you fed it vs jamming is you preventing it from acquiring a signal at all. Jamming is much easier while spoofing can be more difficult if there’s encryption on the signal. Unfortunately I think commercial signals aren’t signed with a private key to completely prevent spoofing but I’m not 100% sure.
  • logifail 2y ago
    > Hacked doesn't seem like the right term ... and this term only appears in the headline, not (anywhere!) in the body text. Wonder if the author of the article intended that term to be used, or whether the (sub)editors put it in to help get more clicks?
    • biker142541 2y ago
      lol, good point. I wouldn't doubt this as a cause.
  • asynchronousx 2y ago
    The vast majority of people don’t know that GPS is only a one-way transaction anyways. They think most devices talk back to the satellites somehow.
    • 2y ago
• ck2 2y ago
  Are GBAS also affected by GPS hacks? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_augmentation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_augmentation What happened to that attempt to use Starlink as a GPS system? Not that we should build anything else that relies on it But only two other sat networks are OneWeb and PlanetLabs with one tenth the sats https://www.datocms-assets.com/53444/1666338747-every-satellite-orbiting-earth-who-owns-them.png https://www.datocms-assets.com/53444/1666338747-every-satell...
• Frederation 2y ago
  To replace the INS system we have now, for when GNSS spoofing etc is done? That clock?
• shannonclaude 2y ago
  Magnetic-anomaly based navigation (MagNav) is a real thing that can solve this problem, and has been shown to work with the accuracy of a few hundred meters. Perhaps the government and defense contractors should look into this technology more. With a few more years of funded R&D and FAA-certification, I think its pretty likely that we'll see some of these systems on planes soon. The military is already flying with it during their exercises. disclosure - I do work on a team developing MagNav, but much of the seminal research has come out of the Air Force Institution of Technology. They performed it on an F16, paper results shown here https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9506809 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9506809
  • mmooss 2y ago
    > Air Force Institution of Technology I've never heard of that - what is it? What's it like to work with them (if you did)?
    • shannonclaude 2y ago
      It's the Air Force's higher ed institution. They offer masters and PhDs. They have their own labs doing R&D.
  • vlovich123 2y ago
    It’s not uncommon to fuse magnetometer with other sensors. We did that for indoor navigation at Apple. In fact, we had prototypes that used only magnetometer and it worked fairly well for what it was but the low update rate and poor resolution meant that it worked to like 10-30 meters which wasn’t usable for indoor by itself. Of course, for indoor there was a lot more “texture” indoors for the commercial magnetometer of the time to pick up whereas outdoor it gets trickier. Is that similar to how MagNav works just with higher quality more sensitive magnetometers?
    • shannonclaude 2y ago
      So the role that magnetometers play in sensor fusion w/ IMU data is for yaw/heading/magnetic north estimation. In short, it aids your orientation (RPY estimate). However, with MagNav, they play a large role in supplying information that allows you to decrease your drift rate. https://www.sagemotion.com/blog/how-does-imu-sensor-fusion-work https://www.sagemotion.com/blog/how-does-imu-sensor-fusion-w...
• reflexe 2y ago
  The article is a bit strange. While GPS can be used to receive accurate timing (phase correction once per second), for gps less navigation, even a picosecond accurate atomic clock wont really give any additional benefit compared to a wirst watch. Using an accurate clock, you might be able to detect spoofing (by detecting small “jumps in time”). However, the same should be possible even with a non accurate clock (a few ppms) by detecting conflicts between the different satellites timings (since the “fake” transmitter is on earth, it will never be able to accurately simulate the real satellites’ airtime delays from space to your specific reception location). On the other hand, if you pair a very accurate clock with a very accurate gyroscope, you might be able to replace gps altogether (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system) But from my knowledge, these kind of gyros are not really available for sale (but this is already outside of my knowledge, so maybe something changed).
  • DannyBee 2y ago
    yeah, i don't get it either. The clock is not the hard part of this. Oscillators doing 10mhz or 1pps with nanosecond accurate holdover for 24hours are easily available (for like 3k for chip-scale atomic clocks, and less for rubidium or whatever ). Galileo et al also have publicly available cryptographic signatures so you can't actually spoof them, only jam them. If you are trying to do navigation while jammed, the reckoning is the hard part of this, not the clock. We solved the clock enough already.
    • Aloisius 2y ago
      > Galileo et al also have publicly available cryptographic signatures so you can't actually spoof them, only jam them. Replay attacks still work allowing one to spoof location.
      • DannyBee 2y ago
        The first thing i said makes this sort of irrelevant, but to go down this path: The replay attacks i'm aware of fall into two categories - cold start and warm start (mostly from https://arxiv.org/html/2501.09246v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2501.09246v1, which has been in progress for a while) The cold start replay attacks are irrelevant here - unless you can force-restart the gps receiver in cold start mode during flight. If you can do that, you probably don't need to spoof the signal. Especially since it requires precise timing to forge the new signal to the receiver at the right time (otherwise it detects it), etc. Seems like there are easier ways. The warm start replay attack A. Requires you replay valid, but out of date, signals, in real time. This is non-trivial, and also limited in effect as you can only arbitrarily spoof one receiver to a location of your choosing - maybe you can get a few receivers with really good high-signal strength directional beaming of different replays, but it requires real-time tracking and adjustment of the signal of the target anyway to be able to spoof the location accurately. Spoofing the location inaccurately is sort of pointless in most cases. B. The attack has to change the time (and thus location) slow enough to not trigger various protections, then keep changing it slowly enough to continue that. C. The attack requires that your receiver is too stupid to notice that a forced revert to non-authenticated time occurred, doesn't notify you of this, and then doesn't notice that time or location jumped suddenly by more than any reasonable amount. It also has to not notice that the SNR of everything suddenly changed, etc. Oh, also, they have to spoof all other sources of time, including local oscillators, etc, for you to not notice. Given we just talked about how cheap and easy it is to have a high quality oscillator disciplined to time before takeoff, this kind of replay attack seems "practical" only in the sense that it is possible. Are you aware of other replay attacks, if so, that'd be cool :) Otherwise, yes, I agree you can spoof location in theory. I can't imagine a practical application of it in the scenario we are talking about.
• deleted 2y ago
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• Animats 2y ago
  Detailed summary from Ops.group, which is for pilots and flight planners.[1] It's really bad. They write: Typical indications of Spoofing Unlike jamming, a GPS signal is present, but it has fake information. False GPS position, time, and date information will be processed by the GPS receiver as being valid. As soon as this is fed to other systems, failure messages will begin. • Rapid EPU or ANP increase • GPS position and IRS or FMS position disagree caution message • Aircraft Clock time changes, or difference between Capt/FO clocks • Transponder failure: EICAS/ECAM “ATC FAIL” • Autopilot turns aircraft unexpectedly • ADS-B Failure/Warning • Synthetic Vision reverting to blue over brown • Loss of enhanced display, such as display of terrain on PDI • Wind indication on ND is illogical or has a major shift - erratic groundspeed • GPS position symbol on ND drifts away from the FMS and the IRS symbols • Datalink (CPDLC, ADS-C) failure warning • GPS information on sensor page shows unusual values: altitude, etc. • Handheld GPS (e.g. Garmin, iPad) disagrees with aircraft GPS position • EGPWS audible warning (‘Pull Up”) • GPS 1 and 2 dramatically different i.e. more than 100 meters, which may also give an ECAM/EICAS GPS miscompare warning. • Spoofing Alerting app e.g. Naviguard gives alert • ACARS message from ground/ops advises of spoofing (based on aircraft downlink message with unusual values) [1] https://ops.group/blog/crew-guidance-published-by-gps-spoofing-workgroup/ https://ops.group/blog/crew-guidance-published-by-gps-spoofi...
• epistasis 2y ago
  Don't worry everyone, we have shut down our Russia cyber defense efforts: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/trump-russia-hacking-cyber-security https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/28/trump-russia... Which implies that we don't need to worry about Russia jamming GPS on our planes, they are just trying to help. Just flow with it and stop panicking.
• neuroelectron 2y ago
  Replace the light beacons on radio towers with a line of sight laser triangulation system.
• manosyja 2y ago
  Of course they called themselves Time Lords, what else would British scientists call themselves? The Kings of Lower Frequencies?
• trhway 2y ago
  How bad is the best inertial navigation is? From what i see it would be pretty sufficient for civilian aviation (for fighter jets doing bunch of turns, etc. that would be different of course) to get into the vicinity of the destination airport. Add correction by stars/Sun - any plane on long flight would get above clouds any way - and you'd get the precision of a modern ICBM - like 30m or so. Who needs GPS then? :) May be it is the time to make a startup to produce such a navigational device?
• ThinkBeat 2y ago
  I dont understand this yet. GPS allows us to navigate, based on the timing of signals from several satellites. GPS jamming would involve flooding the relevant frequecies with noise, or somehow making it harder to acquire the signals? How does creating a more accurate clock at the GPS receiving end help That sounds like the jamming interferes with the speed fo the signals from the satellites which I dont think it likely?
• yimby2001 2y ago
  [flagged]
• nakedneuron 2y ago
  Could that incident 4 days ago in a South Corean maneuvre have anything to do with GPS manipulation? That was my first thought when i heard of it. https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-korean-f-16s-just-162213039.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-korean-f-16s-just-162213039...
• hardstyle 2y ago
  Doesn’t IRS take care of this? https://youtu.be/bFGwjPaxGM0 https://youtu.be/bFGwjPaxGM0
• bluehatbrit 2y ago
  The article mentions the UK Government Risk Register, which I've always thought was pretty interesting. They publish it each year (I think) as a PDF and it's very easy to access and read. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67b5f85732b2aab18314bbe4/National_Risk_Register_2025.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67b5f85732b2a... Page 86 is the start of the "Loss of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services".
• amelius 2y ago
  The recent crash of two ships near the East coast of UK, could it have been caused by GPS hacking?
• mike50 2y ago
  I remember this from stackexchange. Real answer is here. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/108154/how-is-quantum-technology-thought-to-provide-a-potential-navigation-alternativ https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/108154/how-is-q...