Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering • Hacker News Board

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#61

Post by eqvinox » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:03 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #58

15155 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because an attacker can just replay legitimate broadcasts with slightly skewed time and origin and introduce huge errors into the fix.

>> An even bigger WTF is why GPS data isn't signed with some official key so spoofing is impossible. > Because an attacker can just replay legitimate broadcasts with slightly skewed time and origin and introduce huge errors into the fix. Galileo uses a signing system (Timed Efficient Stream Loss-Tolerant Authentication, TESLA) to protect the authenticity of its messages, including preventing replays: * https://gssc.e…

I don't think this helps against someone receiving the signals (all satellites) and rebroadcasting them. The effect of that would be that any receiver of those rebroadcasted signals will believe they are located where the receiver of the rebroadcast is located (just the time is slightly off/late, but that doesn't help much without a reference to check against.)

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#62

Post by eqvinox » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:07 PM UTC

willtemperley wrote: post #60

> Gunning says that, due to the altitude of the Pulsar-0 satellite, the map may not truthfully reflect where jamming is worst for users on the ground Right. So have they employed ground truthing to quantify this uncertainty? Truth was important when I went to GIS school.

https://gpsjam.org/ (ADS-B data from planes, hence limited coverage area.)

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#63

Post by willtemperley » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:23 PM UTC

eqvinox wrote: post #62

willtemperley wrote: post #60

> Gunning says that, due to the altitude of the Pulsar-0 satellite, the map may not truthfully reflect where jamming is worst for users on the ground Right. So have they employed ground truthing to quantify this uncertainty? Truth was important when I went to GIS school.

https://gpsjam.org/ (ADS-B data from planes, hence limited coverage area.)

That’s a lot closer-to-the-ground truth. It would be interesting to compare Xona’s map with this, if they provide the actual data.

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#64

Post by adrian_b » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

themafia wrote: post #34

Animats wrote: post #16

Ops.group published a report on GPS spoofing back in 2024.[1] It's bad. Ops.group is an organization for dispatchers and pilots, the people who decide the routes aircraft take and fly them. They are really angry about it. Key concerns: - The greatest safety concern is the degraded functionality of the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS). The system does not operate correctly after spoofing, even if GPS coverage is…

> spoofing I don't understand how "spoof-to" works. If you have to mimic a satellite then isn't everyone going to get a different location? Unless you're tracking a specific target how can you intentionally spoof them to a desired location? I'd assume the best you could do is create a fixed offset. > The military wants to go mostly inertial and is working on better inertial systems. Given the drift rate this is an id…

There are low-drift-rate inertial solutions, but they have high cost and big size (i.e. laser gyroscopes and accelerometers, with atomic clocks).

So I assume that the research effort is directed towards reducing the cost and size.

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#65

Post by weitzj » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

JAM as a Service

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#66

Post by mirashii » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #54

_moof wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before this, everybody in the industry thought GPS solved the aerial navigation problem. Many people in industry believed this but no one with a brain ever did. The vulnerability of GPS has been cause for concern for a long time, and the decimation of the VOR network has always had a lot of people up in arms.

It seems like we have enough satellites in space that are giving off enough unique signals that we could put together a device that solves the GPS problem without needing GPS itself. I wonder what it would take.

It would take those devices having synchronized atomic clocks, which they do not.

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#67

Post by Enginerrrd » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #24

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they use public key cryptography for that?

Your satellite doesn't want to be sending out lots of different signals - due to a limited power budget. So you have to send out one (or maybe a couple) of signals protected by a key. Yes, you can distribute that key individually to clients using public key cryptography over the same link (and many services like pay TV do exactly that). But fundamentally any client who is able to decrypt the main stream can also shar…

Isn’t this the exact problem tree-based broadcast encryption schemes were designed to solve? You could surgically revoke the keys of a bad actor, and I’m not exactly sure, but I think the scope of their ability to affect the jamming resistance of other users is necessarily limited by the tree.

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#68

Post by hsuduebc2 » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

vachina wrote: post #21

fsh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNSS receivers are passive devices that receive beacons broadcasted from the satellites. It's technically impossible to spy on someone with GNSS.

And 99.99% of those GNSS receivers are connected to the internet. Or are in proximity to an (American controlled/designed) internet connected device.

If we assume that person have a phone, which is majority of these devices with wifi and bluetooth you don't even need any GNSS.

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#69

Post by oneshtein » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

mirashii wrote: post #66

christophilus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like we have enough satellites in space that are giving off enough unique signals that we could put together a device that solves the GPS problem without needing GPS itself. I wonder what it would take.

It would take those devices having synchronized atomic clocks, which they do not.

Atomic clocks are not precise enough, they need nuclear clocks, which are not developed yet: https://thoriumclock.eu/

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#70

Post by stalfie » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

Once again, Russia turns out to be the reason we can't have nice things. War truly is a waste for everyone involved. Now that Russia is also helping North Korea to launch satellites (one so far), expect everything to get worse in the future.

I give it 2-10 years before one of the two threatens an imagined adversary with detonating a nuke in orbit, with the explicit intent of causing Kessler syndrome.