this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New "spoofing" attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is "highly significant" for airline safety.

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[–] cashsky 179 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

TL:DR: Israel and Iran are the source of the spoofing.

Edited*

[–] NOT_RICK 46 points 7 months ago (1 children)

And Iran, according to the article

[–] nixcamic 48 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Israel Iran and Russia be like Israel Iran and Russia be like

[–] deweydecibel 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy is starting to feel like Discord with people dropping lazy images like this in every damn thread.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Literally couldn't even bother to edit the image so the country names are in the image.

[–] nixcamic 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Yeah on my phone in hospital waiting room, didn't have time.

[–] Confused_Emus 7 points 7 months ago

has enough literacy skills to pick up on humor in more than just the shared image

I thought it was funny, anyway…

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I hope everything turns out ok!

[–] nixcamic 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Thanks yeah one of my kids had a chronic condition so it's not really anything unexpected but also not fun and just a ton of waiting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah,I've spent too much time in hospitals with a kid this year. It's the waiting and uncertainty that are the worst.

[–] nixcamic 2 points 7 months ago

Nothing quite messes with your head like having a kid with a serious disease

[–] gibmiser 31 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wow. The state of Israel is really piling on the reasons to hate it these days.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

It was doing this for decades but Western countries only start hearing about it.

Social media have prevailed over classic media, and this time they have proven to be harder to steer.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The article says the spoofing was first recorded in September from Iran, then Israel started doing some after the October Hammas attacks

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Iran has been doing this shit for decades. I'm sure Israel has too.

Basically, they figure out what a GPS receiver would hear if it was receiving signals from a specific location, say "London". They then broadcast those exact signals. Any receiver that hears them now thinks it is in "London".

Start with the aircraft's actual position, and update the spoofed location based where it actually is and and its intended destination, and you can get it to go where you want it.

If the aircraft is trying to fly to London, for example,, and you want it to turn to the east of its track, you start spoofing that it has drifted west on its track to London. The aircraft thinks it is west of London, and turns to the east to get to spoofed-London.

[–] Treczoks 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Actually, the issue is far more complicated than that.

[–] argarath 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Could you expand on what's the issue? I'm honestly curious

[–] Treczoks 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

GPS relies on timing - very precise timing - and signed signals. It might be that GPS units ignore that the signal should be signed, but the (picosecond) timing basically defines an objects' position in space. A picosecond makes a difference of a few centimeters.

Now, modern planes don't primarily rely on GPS. They have gyroscopes. But as gyroscopes lose precision over the duration of the flight, they cross-reference with GPS to fix this loss of precision. But for that, the measured GPS location must be close enough to the gyroscope-based location, or the GPS result is discarded as erroneous. So one needs not only to spoof any GPS signal, it must be close enough to the actual position, and then slowly move the target over.

BTW, the villains in the movie "Tomorrow never dies" use a different approach. They influence the GPS satellites directly, which is a totally different thing, and if Iran did attempt that, I think the US would react differently and ... more directly.

[–] argarath 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Wow this is so cool!! I did know it was timing based and needed to be precise, but this is so crazy! And to think we've gotten so good at making these precise timing circuits to just add them to all phones like it's nothing! This is really cool! And the part about spoofing GPS in planes, that is even crazier how can anyone accomplish that is beyond me it's pretty much magic at this point that's so cool!!

[–] Treczoks 3 points 7 months ago

In the cell phone there are specialized chips that "just" read the signal. They use some interesting tricks to catch the timing right, but can't be used to produce such a signal. The satellite "just" sends a signal with it's own position and the timecode (based on it's own atomic clock). And those nanoseconds and picoseconds of difference when the signals from different satellites arrive determine the distance to those satellites, and together with their position, one can calculate the receivers location.