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What prevents this kind of attack from being used on current commercial airliners?
You'd imagine the pilots would notice if the auto-pilot started flying erratically. I'm sure it could be used to confuse the hell out of the pilots though.
I know the title here is the same as the article, but why the heck did sophos choose "Texas college" for the something done by the University of Texas? I assumed from the title it was done by some small school somewhere in Texas, not UT.
There is only one school in texas worth knowing about.
What prevents this kind of attack from being used on current commercial airliners?
You'd imagine the pilots would notice if the auto-pilot started flying erratically. I'm sure it could be used to confuse the hell out of the pilots though.
The black box transcript from AF 447 is quite an interesting read: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/crashes/...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd imagine the pilots would notice if the auto-pilot started flying erratically. I'm sure it could be used to confuse the hell out of the pilots though.
Even if the pilots didn't, ATC would (and the plane's own GPS unit's internal checks might notice as well) - and then it's simple enough to disable GPS and use VOR navigation (or radar vectors, in a pinch).
Egads, the news coverage of this is horrible fear mongering. The researchers from UT built a system to protect against GPS spoofing. In order to prove that their protection system works, they had to demonstrate that GPS spoofing is feasible. Without exception, every news item on this only mentions the spoofing part, and not the protection part. Military unmanned systems use encrypted GPS that is not vulnerable to the…
Do you have some reasonable sources about GPS jamming? From what I know, GPS should be protected against jamming through signal spreading, which means you should be only able to do it with investing unreasonable amounts of resources.
Low-cost GPS jammers are $30-$50 dollars, though they are illegal to sell or to use. Jamming is a simple matter of sending out a signal more powerful than the signal received from the satellites. 100mW transmitter is more than adequate in close range.
What prevents this kind of attack from being used on current commercial airliners?
What prevents this kind of attack from being used on current commercial airliners?
Primarily because commercial airliners do not use GPS.
There are a few good comments[1] on the article page that point out that Military drones use an encrypted GPS channel that isn't susceptible to this specific attack. A much more sophisticated attack would have to be used to take over a military drone. [1]: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/07/02/drone-hackedwith-...
The US military has always used inertial navigation systems, usually based on extremely precise laser interferometers. You can't spoof or jam inertial guidance short of locally altering the laws of physics. A few decades ago, GPS was used to apply corrections within the (classified) error bounds of the inertial navigation system, which could be significant; any GPS correction outside the error bound of the inertial navigation system was interpreted as GPS being compromised. As the decades have passed, inertial navigation systems have become progressively more precise to the point that GPS is adding a rapidly shrinking amount of extra precision.
In fact, the US military is starting to test a new type of ultra-precise interferometer that allows inertial navigation to exceed the precision of GPS. GPS correct INS will only continue to be used to the extent it is inexpensive and gets the job done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or against US soldiers.
You would still need a strong signal near the target, which is more difficult than setting up a drone-trap like Iran seems to have done. Is it possible to somehow sign GPS coordinates? (Perhaps sync an internal clock at each mission's start, and check a time-based signature?) If not, are there practical challenges to integrating the output of a drone's engine and calculating the path travelled, instead of naively bel…
GPS spoofing/jamming only works for systems that use GPS navigation systems; military weapons and systems have never used GPS navigation. Inertial navigation systems are spoof-proof.