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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[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months ago

Ah, I see, I misunderstood what you meant

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months 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 11 months ago

There's also a height limit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months 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 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months 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.