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Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

newscientist.com

11–20 of 78 posts

Re: Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

#11
post #6

many NATO guided bombs, missiles and drones rely on GPS navigation There are separate code sets for civilian and military GPS, and the latter should only be availability to US military equipment manufacturers. What I wonder is whether that means some NATO equipment will be misdirected by spoofing attacks and other will not, or if the attackers actually are able to spoof both types of signal.

> if the attackers actually are able to spoof both types of signal.

Interestingly, the military GPS signal is encrypted using what is called the A/S "anti-spoof" code. Which was deployed in the '70s. So you know they've been thinking about it for quite some time.

Practically speaking: Assuming one can shield the spoofer receiver from its own transmitter there's no real reason why a spoofer can't set up a receiver at one location and rebroadcast the encrypted signal as received there. If rebroadcast at sufficient power it would easily overpower the true signal, and would indicate the spoofer position rather than true position everywhere it was the strongest signal. Sort of like if you just moved everyone's antenna to the spoofer location using a very long antenna cable.

It would be very interesting to know what military receivers do to mitigate such an attack. I haven't seen anything in open literature. I suppose it would be (rightfully so) classified technology.

Re: Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

#12
post #2

You will be relieved to know that the military is on top of this and regularly trains for GPS jamming scenarios https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/information/gps-jamming-ex...

If you RTFA, you'll note that jamming is different than spoofing. And no it doesn't make me feel relieved that the military "is on top of this". Whose military? Why should we trust them? State actors with the capability to spoof GPS signals can do much harm to even their own citizens.

> If you RTFA, you'll note that jamming is different than spoofing.

Military GPS signals (P-code and future M-code) are encrypted, so spoofing is somewhat less of a concern for the military. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Precision_code and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Military_.28M-code...

Outside of the military, both academia and industry are well aware of the potential for spoofing of civilian GNSS signals and have been developing proof of concept attacks and countermeasures for quite some time. See, for example, http://gpsworld.com/inexpensive-hack-spoofs-gps-in-smartphon... and https://www.ion.org/publications/abstract.cfm?articleID=1478...

Re: Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

#15
post #2

You will be relieved to know that the military is on top of this and regularly trains for GPS jamming scenarios https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/information/gps-jamming-ex...

If you RTFA, you'll note that jamming is different than spoofing. And no it doesn't make me feel relieved that the military "is on top of this". Whose military? Why should we trust them? State actors with the capability to spoof GPS signals can do much harm to even their own citizens.

In the case of using the encrypted GPS I would guess that spoofing would look like jamming. Basically if you were getting a GPS signal and it wasn't encrypted correctly you would consider it invalid but you're probably not seeing the real satellites because you're seeing the spoof signal. The net result being you are seeing no GPS signal you can trust. That reduces down to the previously solved problem of operating with no GPS at all.

Re: Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

#16
post #6

many NATO guided bombs, missiles and drones rely on GPS navigation There are separate code sets for civilian and military GPS, and the latter should only be availability to US military equipment manufacturers. What I wonder is whether that means some NATO equipment will be misdirected by spoofing attacks and other will not, or if the attackers actually are able to spoof both types of signal.

> if the attackers actually are able to spoof both types of signal. Interestingly, the military GPS signal is encrypted using what is called the A/S "anti-spoof" code. Which was deployed in the '70s. So you know they've been thinking about it for quite some time. Practically speaking: Assuming one can shield the spoofer receiver from its own transmitter there's no real reason why a spoofer can't set up a receiver at…

Is this really possible? I don't know much technical details about GPS, but I thought a large component was time-based. If my understanding is correct, wouldn't rebroadcasting fail because the times didn't match correctly?

Re: Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

#18
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you RTFA, you'll note that jamming is different than spoofing. And no it doesn't make me feel relieved that the military "is on top of this". Whose military? Why should we trust them? State actors with the capability to spoof GPS signals can do much harm to even their own citizens.

It's not comforting, indeed. But you should know that the various space-based positioning systems (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou etc) are deployed and administered by the respective governments of their countries of origin. They were invented for the military and can be selectively disabled or degraded for civilian users. Does anyone think it's possible for non-governments to stand up replacements for these systems, from eith…

It'd be very easy to make a law outlawing high-resoluton satellite positioning systems. All lawmakers would need to claim is it was a national security issue that terrorists could use blah blah.

From a technical perspective it's not hard at all, but corporations are probably leery of launching (no pun intended) such a business.

Re: Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

#20

Time to break out from storage: sextant, compass, paper map, ...

The Navy was a couple years ahead of you, they've already started training officers to navigate by non-electric means: http://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-back....
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