A perfect use case for public key cryptography. Digitally sign the GPS coords!
Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#22Perhaps I just don't understand how this works all that well, but shouldn't it be easy to defeat GPS spoofing when you're 30,000+ feet in the air? Presumably the spoofed GPS signals are all coming from the ground, or close to it. I would think it would work to use a semi-directional antenna that is on top of the aircraft, pointing upward. Even an antenna that has a 180-degree field of view should reject fake GPS sign…
the gps receivers are probably not going to be able to detect the direction a signal comes from.
You're right, a cheap GPS isn't going to do that.. however, it is well within then realm of possibility to design a GPS receiver system that uses beamforming to lock onto satellites and ignore everything else for orders of magnitude better jamming resistance.
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#23For the past 10 years I've been travelling to Russia occasionally. Normally during a flight I like opening up my GPS app to check the location, altitude and speed of the aicraft. About a year ago I noticed that shortly after crossing Russias border the GPS stopped working. Initially I thought it was a glitch, but after a few flights it became obvious that something was going on, probably the signal was baing jammed.…
Planes have used inertial navigation for a long time. Adding GPS to that mix is relatively recent. GPS was never really intended to be used for navigation even though it can be and often is. There was no need for it to be particularly reliable when it was designed since the Soviets could easily kill it if they wanted to. It had a different purpose.
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#24For the past 10 years I've been travelling to Russia occasionally. Normally during a flight I like opening up my GPS app to check the location, altitude and speed of the aicraft. About a year ago I noticed that shortly after crossing Russias border the GPS stopped working. Initially I thought it was a glitch, but after a few flights it became obvious that something was going on, probably the signal was baing jammed.…
This? https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/russia-ja... As for planes, can they do GLONASS?
I would imagine any military “GPS Jammer” would also block similar systems…
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#25For the past 10 years I've been travelling to Russia occasionally. Normally during a flight I like opening up my GPS app to check the location, altitude and speed of the aicraft. About a year ago I noticed that shortly after crossing Russias border the GPS stopped working. Initially I thought it was a glitch, but after a few flights it became obvious that something was going on, probably the signal was baing jammed.…
This? https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/russia-ja... As for planes, can they do GLONASS?
My phone is supposed to support GPS, Glonass, Beidou and Galileo, so apparently all of them were jammed.
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#26Perhaps I just don't understand how this works all that well, but shouldn't it be easy to defeat GPS spoofing when you're 30,000+ feet in the air? Presumably the spoofed GPS signals are all coming from the ground, or close to it. I would think it would work to use a semi-directional antenna that is on top of the aircraft, pointing upward. Even an antenna that has a 180-degree field of view should reject fake GPS sign…
Radio goes through and reflects off things, including aircraft. GPS signals are incredibly weak, and even if an aircraft attenuates or reflects 99.9% of the signal, a ground based system will nearly always be able to overpower it. It can be as simple as reflecting off the tail section of the aircraft.
Incredibly weak is correct and even bordering on understatement. They are below the noise floor by about 50dB (which is a logarithmic scale, so is a factor of 100,000x).
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#27The author seems to believe that GPS is the only and primary form of navigation. Pilots in the US are trained from day one to use landmarks and dead-reckoning. From there the skills are built upon to where I believe it would be difficult to push a crew to such a gross navigational error that it causes disaster. I’ll need to read the article more closely but it appears to be a lot of fluff and leaves out the many laye…
It's mostly fear mongering for Regular Joe, along with: > Another important development was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Vastly outnumbered in jets and tanks, Ukrainians quickly jury-rigged a miniature air force out of off-the-shelf drones carrying improvised munitions Lol, Ukrainians were watching videos from Syria and Afghanistan and implementing ISIS tactics for years before 2022.
I think the drone war is getting off the charts. 300,000 per month!?! [1] This will definitely have impacts in the coming decade both in war and terror/counter-terror applications.
[1] https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/01/05/russia-produces-300...
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
This? https://www.defenseone.com/defense-systems/2023/12/russia-ja... As for planes, can they do GLONASS?
My phone is supposed to support GPS, Glonass, Beidou and Galileo, so apparently all of them were jammed.
I guess it would make sense if they were all jammed, though I'm not sure the fact that your phone didn't pick those up really proves this was the case? I have no idea how these work but I could totally imagine phones interpreting jammed signals differently from weak/nonexistent ones. Plus, I've had at least one that nominally supported all of those but in practice didn't really feel that way. You're probably right, just not sure you can deduce it from your phone in particular.
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The evidence shows that the contrary. Has a plane ever gone down from “electronic warfare?” Does the fact that no one has killed me yet indicate that I'm immortal?
No, but assuming most of your friends and family haven't been murdered, we may assume murder is unlikely to be the cause of your death.
Whether or not my friends and family have been murdered shouldn't be correlated with whether or not I've been murdered. Unless we're all in the same place most of the time, I guess?
Re: Air travel is not ready for electronic warfare
#30The author seems to believe that GPS is the only and primary form of navigation. Pilots in the US are trained from day one to use landmarks and dead-reckoning. From there the skills are built upon to where I believe it would be difficult to push a crew to such a gross navigational error that it causes disaster. I’ll need to read the article more closely but it appears to be a lot of fluff and leaves out the many laye…
Commercial traffic flying at 30-40 thousand feet is not flying VFR typically. And of course spotting landmarks through cloud cover or at night is not a thing. But you are right that spoofing would largely just be annoying. Commercial traffic is usually in contact with a controller and monitored on radar. So, any course deviations would result in controllers asking what they are doing and be followed by them simply vectoring them back on course with compass headings.
However, GPS has replaced a lot of the NDB and VOR radios that pilots used to rely on. Also a lot of airport approaches are now GPS rather than ILS/VOR. It's pretty critical to modern aviation.
GPS, or rather GNSS (which includes GPS and other systems), spoofing is a concern; but so far mainly in conflict areas. Most airlines would route around those.
Resilience against spoofing is actually a big topic from a strategic point of view. Also, spoofing is a big part of counter measures against drones in e.g. Ukraine. So there is a bit of an arms race going there.
The point with GNSS is that most phones can utilize multiple satellite positioning systems at the same time at this point. Which is of course something that navigation systems in planes could also do. And of course many pilots actually use ipads in the cockpit, which they could use as a backup in case of an electrical failure in the plane.