L4sBotNov 23, 2023

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do

https://lemmy.world/post/8651764

Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do - Lemmy.World

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.

Show threadthehatfoxNov 23, 2023

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.

Show threadForesterNov 23, 2023
GPS guided drone attacks
Show threadshortwavesurferNov 23, 2023
Are you meaning 300 measurements per second? Because civilian gps has an accuracy of ~3 meters. I may be misunderstanding though
Show threadironeaglNov 23, 2023

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.

Show threadsanmarzano
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.
Nov 23, 2023 at 6:56pmWeb