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 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

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

Edited*

[–] NOT_RICK 46 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And Iran, according to the article

[–] nixcamic 48 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (8 children)

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

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[–] gibmiser 31 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] RememberTheApollo 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 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 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 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.

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[–] deweydecibel 123 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission

Tomorrow Never Dies continues to be bizarrely relevant.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is that the one with Jonathan Pryce as the villain? That was a good one

[–] deweydecibel 49 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

Johnathan Pryce as the mad, egocentric head of a mass media and tech empire with an inordinate amount of reach and influence on the world stage, who is chiefly concerned with becoming the sole source of media in a post-CCP China.

Which sounds funny and ridiculous in a 1997 spy movie, but in the last 20 years, we've seen just how much power mass media companies wield, how they can manipulate sizable percentages of a population, and how being the exclusive source of news for an entire country (China, no less) would give a media mogul incredible power and influence.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I'm not nervous, you're nervous

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Fucking serves them right, the aviation industry have been buying GPS devices for decades that bleed outside and don't explicitly filter down to their spectrum. There was a satellite internet startup in the US that went through the whole process, bought its spectrum and was ready to launch, then the aviation industry complained and had them shut down because their devices were all shit and "it would be too difficult to change everyone's equipment".

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Do you have something I can read about this? It's a little vague, so hard for me to search, and it sounds like something I would be interested in. Thanks

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Pretty sure this is the story, rings true to my memory of the company name starting with "L": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/lightsquared-broadband-a-threat-to-gps/

Although this article doesn't cover how the GPS systems used cheap filtering circuits that didn't adequately filter out adjacent frequencies. This was done purely to save money, because there wasn't anything using the adjacent frequencies. As a result, LightSquared went bankrupt in 2012.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago (11 children)

That just means you can't use autoland in low visibility conditions. Modern IRUs (inertial reference unit) are highly accurate laser gyros that can use GPS for correction, but will throw out the data if it doesn't make sense. Navigation won't be affected much, and autoland (if used) will still rely on VHF guidance.

[–] Delogrand 30 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Modern IRUs also take input from multiple sources (GPS, Navaids) to update their drift error. With spoofed GPS, bad drift corrections are made and when the navigation solution eventually fails the IRU is just as unusable.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (3 children)

But the article mentioned that "the spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System". How?

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[–] someguy3 8 points 11 months ago (6 children)

How do IRUs work do to give you location?

[–] dhork 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Imagine you can't see or hear anything but you can read a compass, and you have an internal map of your house and neighborhood. You also know how long your steps are with some amount of accuracy. You would probably be able to get out of your house and maybe to the corner store, but the inaccuracies in your compass and distance estimation would add up over time, and on a long walk you might overshoot the sidewalk and walk down the middle of a busy street by mistake.

[–] scarabic 13 points 11 months ago

“Give me a stopwatch and a map and I’ll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows?”

This was supposed to be a wild boast by the Russian navigator in Hunt for Red October but is apparently now standard piloting procedure.

[–] Maudfer 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They know where you took off from, and can detect your movement with precision.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

It's knows where it was and where it isn't

[–] thehatfox 8 points 11 months ago

They use gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the aircrafts movement from the starting position at takeoff. That can then be used to plot the course the aircraft has taken to show the current location.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (2 children)

We need a backup for GPS. LORAN should never have been shut down.

[–] Dimand 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I can't see how omega and similar were not just as susceptible to this type of attack. Active outside in positioning almost always has this vulnerability.

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[–] firewyre 27 points 11 months ago

Yet another reason to avoid the middle east

[–] AlijahTheMediocre 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've got an idea, how bout stop using the same technology from 20 years ago?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Huh what do you propose then, go back to the 1960s and ensure they are only using VOR and DME ground equipment. There isn't a check sum to check on GPS/GNSS it just a bunch of satellites broadcasting what they think is the correct time. If you jam those and replace them with signals close enough but wrong values you can trick the math that's used inside the GPS/GNSS receiver that computes the the position (and velocity), and it looks like this signal can be introduced slow enough to trick the receiver in real-world applications. One trick to protect yourself is to ensure the signals you receive are from the direction you expect but we aren't going to attach directional antennas on every face of a civilian aircraft, to ensure the strongest signal is from the top of the plane and not the bottom. Essentially civil navigation equipment isn't supposed to be messed with and if it is authorities are supposed to go over and arrest and fine the idiots doing things over the radio they shouldnt. When the bad guy is a government well yea I guess that plan doesn't work and governing bodies such as ICAO should impose penalties like no commerical aircraft from companies from those countries are not allowed elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (4 children)

That's one way to do it.

Or avionics companies could sell modern equipment that uses multiple constellations (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo), is capable of acquiring more satellites at a time than a 20 year old system, and has basic jamming protection like ignoring spurious signals. You know: like consumer devices have been doing for years.

Then the commercial operators could install them in their aircraft.

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[–] thehatfox 25 points 11 months ago (3 children)

This sounds rather dangerous. GPS was originally opened up to civilian use for the purpose of keeping flights on course, after the disaster of Korean Air Flight 007 straying into Soviet airspace and being shot down back in the 1980s.

I can't understand what is to be gained by deliberately trying to knock civilian airliners off course.

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

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What about GLONASS, Galilleo, or BDS? Are they all being equally jammed? Why wouldn’t they sync with all of them and use a consensus to determine accuracy? Like having multiple ntp servers.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago

The latest generations of gnss receivers have spoofing and jamming mitigation and detection features included with the chip, and multi-band rx technology to sync to more constellations simultaneously and do exactly what you're talking about. Before then, the spoofing/jamming detection would likely need a software implementation after the receiver. There are different types of spoofing/jamming, all of which are detected and mitigated in different ways.

I don't know the commercial aircraft industry standards for updating technology, but I wouldn't be surprised if most commercial aircraft don't have what you're talking about.

[–] nixcamic 19 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Do none of the systems, GPS, glonass etc. use encryption or authentication of any form?

[–] AreaKode 14 points 11 months ago (14 children)

The problem is with the way GPS works. Your device gets telemetry from the satellites. A fake signal can screw up the whole system.

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[–] Lafrack 13 points 11 months ago

Yes Galileo supports encryption. But as far as I know it's not in use. Has been trialled only. But I know all Airbus aircraft only support GPS satellites and nothing else (yet). I assume Boeing, being American would be the same then.

As far as solutions go, an aircraft can navigate fine without GPS. It can update its position from ground navigation aids and if they are not available it can still Dead Reckon very well. The navigation error very slowly grows until it's out of the black spot and can use GPS or navigation aid to increase its accuracy. But this navigation error on the time frame of say an hour is a matter of kilometers at most, not dozens.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nope. And more importantly, it looks like nobody considered what might happen if the signal gets spoofed. The backup systems that are supposed to keep working if GPS breaks also break due to these spoofed signals.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (5 children)

GPS is encrypted, it's just that the US military won't share the encryption keys so the rest of us have to use the unencrypted channels. They've clearly thought about it and decided against making it public.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I generally don't believe in an isolationist American policy except for Israel. They always drag us into stupid shit like this.

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