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 threadnixcamic
Do none of the systems, GPS, glonass etc. use encryption or authentication of any form?
Nov 23, 2023 at 7:07pmWeb
Show threadSeriousBugNov 23, 2023
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.
Show threadAjenNov 23, 2023
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.
Show thread_s10eNov 23, 2023

GPS is old, the amount of data you get from the satellite is small, essentially satellite id and timestamp. If we would redesign this today, you could include a digital signature.

Sure, but… you can google this to verify … one can probably manipulate GPS by introducing delay, i.e. resend data from a sat that was hear some seconds ago. With this signal the location will be off.

Show threadTreczoksNov 24, 2023
But that would also mean the timestamp to be off. Just resending them would also require extremely precise timing if you want to simulate a position that is not anywhere but just a bit off the last position. Making a GPS position jumping around half the world is (comparably) easy, pushing it off for a few kilometers is much, much harder.
Show threadLafrackNov 23, 2023

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.