this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
426 points (98.9% liked)

Technology

59598 readers
2896 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

GPS guided drone attacks. Civilian GPS top out at 300 m a second. Anything beyond that is a missile and GPS refuses to work unless you have one of the special government GPS chips without the limiter.

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

Would that be relevant for a drone attack? I wouldn't think a drone that isn't operated by a state actor is likely to be moving that fast, and presumably a state actor could build their own chips without a limiter?

[–] billiam0202 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thus the point of the spoofing. A drone will be moving much slower than 300 m/s, so spoofing GPS would be an attempt to force it off-course.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ah, I see, I misunderstood what you meant

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you meaning 300 measurements per second? Because civilian gps has an accuracy of ~3 meters. I may be misunderstanding though

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The GPS chips have internal limits on how fast they think they can move. If they determine that they are moving faster than 300m/s they will stop outputting any results for a period of time. This limit is, IIRC, put in at the silicon level, so only military chips can bypass it.

If you try to use mapping apps on a plane you sometimes run into this issue.

[–] sanmarzano 6 points 1 year ago

It is trivial to make your GPS receiver firmware ignore these limits. There are even open-source receivers (SwiftNav piksi, for example). Modifying a binary is much harder, but not impossible for a motivated state like Iran or Russia. It's best to think of the COCOM limits as suggestions.

[–] EarMaster 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But even the fastest airliners at the moment (A330 neo) moves slower than 300m/s. Wikipedia claims that COCOM limits are even higher so I don't think that they are the reason for the inaccurate tracking on planes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

There's also a height limit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Turns out it's 1000 knots (~600m/s), or 18,000 feet. So it's the altitude in this case. But a slow-moving drone at <18,000ft is fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Maybe a misapplication then. I've run into it with model rocketry before (for good reason)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh, neat. I was not aware of that. I have seen that before but thought it was due to the phone not being able to lock on to the signal from inside a big metal tube.